One mini cake per guest. Three to five petit fours per guest. Plan a table with each and the difference explains itself before anyone has tasted anything. Everything else about the two formats follows from that gap in scale.
One cake, one person
A mini cake is a whole dessert shrunk to a single portion, and it is finished like one. The Lemon Daisy is a tangy lemon cake with a sharp, clean citrus edge, under a white chocolate ganache that softens on the tongue and slows the acid down. The Nutella is ground hazelnut cake, close-grained and faintly damp, finished with a Nutella white chocolate ganache. The Caprese is finely ground almonds and dark chocolate, dense and flourless in the Italian style, heavy enough to drag on the fork. They start at $9 individually and also come as a tray of six or a tray of twelve. The whole mini cake range works the same way. One guest, one cake, no cutting and no serving spoon.
Fifteen to a tray
Petit four means small oven in French. The name describes how they were once baked and nothing about how they eat now. A petit four tray is $60 and holds fifteen pieces. Ten flavours run through it: Mocha, The Pear, S'more, Emerald, Tronco, Miniature Tiramisu, Passionfruit Pavlova, Blueberry Panna Cotta, Dark Chocolate Strawberry Brownie and Snickers.
All ten are made with no added gluten. Under recent New Zealand food labelling rules we do not claim anything is gluten free, only that we have not added gluten-containing ingredients. Our kitchen is small and without exclusive production areas for all of our different recipes, so traces may occur. Nothing is guaranteed safe for severe coeliac disease. The Snickers petit four contains peanuts, plainly, and we never claim anything is nut free. The no added gluten cakes and desserts collection shows what else sits in that category.
What changes when a dessert gets smaller
Almost nothing is taken out. That surprises people. A Passionfruit Pavlova petit four is a meringue shell piped by hand, crisp on the outside and marshmallowy inside, filled with a passionfruit curd sharp enough to make you blink. A Blueberry Panna Cotta is real vanilla bean panna cotta, set by hand, wobbling over blueberries underneath. A Dark Chocolate Strawberry Brownie stacks a brownie base, dark chocolate whipped cream and strawberry jam. A Snickers carries peanut chocolate cake, dulce de leche mousse and a peanut crunch that gives way between the teeth. Every one of those components is made separately, then assembled at a scale where a millimetre is visible. Shrinking a dessert multiplies the number of small, exacting operations. It simplifies nothing.
Why seven days and not two
Most of what we make needs two days' notice, and the larger desserts need three. Petit fours need seven. The reason is arithmetic, not difficulty. One tray is fifteen pieces. Each piece carries three or four components made separately before anything is assembled. A modest order of four trays is sixty pieces, each with its own three or four components, all made with no added gluten, in a kitchen that is also turning out the day's cabinet. Seven days is what makes that work without shortcuts. Pick the date, count back seven, order before that.
Building a table with both
For twenty to fifty guests the two formats do different jobs. Petit fours give you range and volume, three to five a head, and they read as detail on a modern table. Mini cakes give every guest one complete dessert with no cutting, worth a great deal when there is no kitchen and no staff. A cake from the tea cakes and loaves range adds height in the middle, holds at room temperature and needs no fridge. The mini cakes and petit fours collection has the full range in one place, and the dessert catering boxes page sets out the other formats.
Before you commit to four trays, bring whoever is hosting alongside you. Buy two mini cakes from the cabinet, one each, and swap halfway. Ten minutes at a table tells you more than any amount of looking at photographs, and the decision comes out shared instead of defended later.
Coming to get it
Petit four trays need seven days' notice. Mini cake trays need two. The date picker at checkout only offers dates the kitchen can meet for what is in your cart, so you cannot accidentally ask for the impossible. Collection only, events included; we do not deliver. Come to the patisserie inside The Welder on Welles Street in the central city, 10am to 9pm Tuesday to Saturday.
