My Family’s Funniest Holiday Tradition Comes From a 100-Year-Old Midwestern Candy Maker
Made by a family-owned company in Wisconsin, these treats feel charmingly homespun. They deliver a festive sugar rush, although they may not please gourmet-level palates.
What’s so funny about a dessert sampler from a 99-year-old, family-run, Wisconsin-based mail-order company? Let me spell it out for you.
A petit four is a bite-sized pastry originating centuries ago in France. It was given the name “petit four,” meaning “small oven,” because it was baked over residual heat after an oven had been used as a “grand four” for foods requiring higher temperatures, like breads and meats.
Petits fours can vary in shape, size, flavors, and textures, but in the US, they’re typically square bits of mini layer cake covered in chocolate or a thin coat of icing. They were introduced to The Swiss Colony’s catalog in 1961 after founder Ray Kubly asked one of the company’s Austrian-trained master chefs to suggest a finger-food-style dessert that his wife could serve at a party. According to the company’s blog, chef Horst Hart replied, “You want petits fours!”
Today, Swiss Colony’s petits fours come in dozens of flavor varieties, including holiday-themed assortments for Halloween, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, and most abundantly, Christmas. Many of them feature hand-piped messages ranging from a quotidian “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays” to a quirky “Dear Santa, I Can Explain.”
For my family, that’s where the fun and the new tradition started.
We all have a sweet tooth, so when Chris and Debi first sent us a box of Merry Christmas Petits Fours from The Swiss Colony several years ago, we happily dove in, one morsel at a time.
But we’re also a family of goofballs. When we texted Chris and Debi a note of thanks, we did so with a pic of the remaining petits fours arranged to spell out the silliest gobbledygook we could come up with: “Hire My Mr. Rats.”
And just like that, we had a great new tradition to look forward to during the holidays.
Chris and Debi have since been sending us a new selection from The Swiss Colony’s entire array of yuletide-themed boxes every year. They love receiving our weird petit four pics and are always happy to play along.
The Feliz Navidad Petits Fours were an especially big hit. “Vain Dadz Life” is a nonsense phrase we still reference, and perhaps we will one day form a family emo-punk trio with that name.
Or maybe we will resurrect Yul Brynner and mount a new production of a classic Broadway musical with a meat-themed twist: “Veal and I.”
As much as my family would love to just house these little bad boys the second they show up at our door, we’ve had to pace ourselves in order to make the game last as long as possible. That’s not easy, because we find them to be pretty irresistible. However, if you or your gift recipient has a more discerning, refined sensibility than my little horde of sugar lovers, just know that your mileage may vary.
I asked our kitchen team to taste test a sampler, and the feedback I received was less than rapturous. “The vanilla one I tried was especially cloying,” editor Gabriella Gershenson told me. “The one that I liked the best was the strawberry, because the jam layer gave the cake some dimension the others were missing,” she added. “I also appreciated that the cakes were mostly fluffy … but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy them all that much.”
Another kitchen editor, Marilyn Ong, compared them to Hostess Ding Dongs (which, she added, are pretty great if you’re into nostalgic foods). “These are not Valerie chocolates,” she said, referencing one of our picks for the best boxed chocolates. “The flavor is kind of down-home. But they are fun and very cute.” (If you’d rather give something more high-end, Valerie’s holiday collection includes pumpkin-, eggnog-, and champagne-flavored petits fours.)
This year’s Swiss Colony box will probably arrive any day now, and when it does, my family of three will once again gleefully dive in and start concocting more hilarious nonsense talk. But we’ll be sure to send Chris and Debi our usual note of thanks as well. Probably, it will say something like, “P.S. Yay!”
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Catherine Kast.
