Petits Fours

As I have made clear on a number of occasions in previous posts, one of the things that is impossibly perfect about us French women is our figures.  We have impossibly perfect figures on account of how little we eat, but we eat exceptionally dainty portions of very delicious food.

Another way of doing food correctly that is quintessentially French is petits fours (there are somewhat similar delicacies in Austria called Punschkrapfen, but this is the only vaguely similar thing in Austria and they don't come close to the perfection of petits fours).  "Petits fours" translates as "small ovens".

French women, on account of being much better than American and British women in pretty much everything they do, like to have minuscule portions of a larger number of different food types.  Some exceptionally dainty petits fours allow us to do this.

I can't stand the way Americans don't know how to do desserts properly.  What they do is shove a huge piece of cake onto a huge plate with some disgusting sauce (say chocolate) with no thought for presentation.  The end result tends to be overly sweet: - I feel so sophisticated on account of finding myself disliking overly sweet desserts.

Bumpkins like desserts to be as sweet as possible, whereas a French woman knows that an ideal dessert is only as sweet as it needs to be to cleanse one's palate of the previous course.  A French woman is also much more sophisticated than her counterparts in the USA and UK because she prefers her desserts to be slightly tart, rather than overly sweet.

However, super-sweet foods can still be pleasurable to sophisticated French women.  In order for a French woman to find them pleasurable, they need to be in the form of elegantly-crafted exceptionally dainty petits fours.  When living in the UK, there is a product made by a company called Mr. Kipling somewhat similar in size (though still large by the standards of a French woman) called French Fancies (a.k.a. Fondant Fancies when made by other people): - disgusting stuff!  The "buttercream" is actually made with vegetable oil and although the chocolate variety has some chocolate included, the strawberry and lemon flavours do not use these ingredients and use artificial flavours instead.  Also, the cakes are 30% sugar: - as mentioned, sophisticated people don't like overly sweet foods.  I remember one occasion in the UK where I found myself high-and-dry in terms of food options and I bought this disgusting cake, thinking it was going to be palatable: - I spat it out in disgust as a natural reflex and unfortunately made quite a spectacle of myself.  I thought I was going to need an ambulance, lol ("mdr" in French)!

Though a French woman despises the taste of overly sweet full-size desserts, she will sometimes have petits fours at the end of several courses, say a starter, a main course, a cheese course etc.  A French woman loathes cupcakes, but, as a very occasional indulgence, might have a micro-sized cupcake as a petit four, though she will normally prefer desserts of French origin, e.g. mille feuille, knowing that French cuisine is far more sophisticated.  One thing we French women are good at that helps make us effortlessly perfect is being able to treat foods as treats if they are meant to be treated that way: - we don't binge on a huge chocolate dessert slathered in chocolate sauce every single mealtime like big, fat, ugly and disgusting American women do.  Vive la France!