[Photo: Kathy YL Chan]

Best known for their chocolate-dipped toffee collection, Valerie Confections was started in 2004 by Valerie Gordon and Stan Weightman, Jr. Since then, the Los Angeles-based company has created different lines of artisan sweets, including gorgeous handmade petit fours.

Offered in eight different flavors, they taste as good as they look. Disregard any thoughts of flavorless fondant-draped sugary sweets that come to mind with the words "petit fours." These are modern, intricate and fresh, each a personal-sized cake for one. There's a lemon, which couples thin layers of a bright lemon cake with lemon curd and a finish of white chocolate. Orange pairs orange cake with marzipan and ginger; it's unexpectedly spicy and matched with white-chocolate-ginger ganache. The ginger and the champagne petit fours are the only ones finished in a silky bittersweet chocolate glaze.

My favorite, however, has to be the Matcha and Rose Petals Collection ($53), which includes six pieces of each. The Rose Petal alternates three layers of a vanilla bean cake with a fragrant, but not overly flowery rose petal ganache. Cake and ganache are dipped in white chocolate and finished with a candied rose petal. The soft-hued pink matches well with the Matcha, where an intense, almost heady matcha cake meets white chocolate ganache. To eat yourself or to give as gifts, the petite fours will be plenty satisfying. Keep in mind, if a set of twelve petit fours is too much, they also offer a $16 sampler pack with four pieces, one each of lemon, rose, ginger, and orange.

Valerie Confections

valerieconfections.com

About the author: Originally from Honolulu, Kathy YL Chan writes A Passion For Food, where she chronicles her eats and travels adventures between Hawai'i, New York and beyond. She firmly believes that there is always room for dessert.