MONROE — The top 16 contenders for the fourth annual “Coolest Things Made in Wisconsin” contest were announced and put into a “Wisconsin Manufacturing Madness” bracket Sept. 16; Monroe’s famous Swiss Colony petits fours were among them. 

That wasn’t exactly an easy feat, with more than 150 fellow nominees they had to beat to get there. 

“It’s really exciting and I think the fun thing is to be able to share it with the people in the bakery that actually work on making those petits fours,” said Lisa Christiansen, a brand manager at Colony Brands who does food merchandising. 

“They’re proud,” said Vanita Baumgartner, the director of manufacturing who runs the bakery. “Here they are tucked away in a factory. They don’t always get to see the customer reaction and the happy faces and all of that.”

“We have longevity in the bakery,” Baumgartner said, including employees that have been there for 20, 30 or 40 years. 

But the company’s history with the petit four goes back even further.

In the mid-20th century, Austrian Horst Hart was one of the skilled European pastry chefs brought to Wisconsin by The Swiss Colony, recruited for their experience and “Old World” recipes. And yet it wasn’t research and development, but a treat he whipped up for his boss’s get together that would help define the company forever.

“[The Swiss Colony founder Ray Kubly] wanted some little portable dessert to be made,” said Christiansen. “Horst right away knew that petits fours would be the perfect thing for their party.” 

Guests loved the petite treat and The Swiss Colony decided to start making them in the bakery. In 1961, Hart produced 60,000 petits fours by hand. Now, the bakery averages half that in a single day. 

French for “little oven,” a petit four is a tiny layer cake, but the manufacturing process is anything but tiny. 

Cake batter starts out in a gigantic mixer, then is sent over to where it will be pumped directly onto the surface of the band oven, which is like an enclosed cooking conveyer belt that stretches for 60 feet, and is then leveled to a uniform thickness. 

Pastry that thin doesn’t take long to bake — red velvet is done in about six or seven minutes — and the continuous stretch of cake is cut into sheets of the proper length. It then passes through a cooling tunnel, after which it’s ready to be made into a “brick” — layers of cake and cream all put together. Next, bricks are chilled for at least 24 hours and pressed down with weight pans to solidify. 

Cooled bricks are then cut in one of two ways. The first is thanks to a robot they’ve christened BART, which stands for Baker’s Automated Robotic Teammate. BART shoots tiny water jets through the brick to cut it into even bite-sized pieces, their intensity so targeted they don’t dampen the dessert. The other method is ultrasonic, like a fast-moving butter knife that cuts with vibration. 

Then it’s time for the petits fours to be enrobed, the process of coating them in chocolate or a compound coating. Cakes go through the enrobing shower twice to maximize coverage, then an employee on the line works to patch up spots that the machine might have missed.  

Finally, the enrobed cakes go through one last cooling tunnel to set so they can be decorated. Other than stripes and cross-hatching, all decorating is done by hand. Some of the more intricate designs, like letters or Santa faces, are done “off-line” in a separate room. 

From there the petits fours are ready to be made into myriad combinations of varying sizes in festive patterns. Maybe it’s a traditional set with flavors like chocolate, lemon and vanilla grouped by design. Perhaps the letter Ts will become part of the phrase “Let It Snow” among other petits fours dotted with snowflakes. 

“We can always come up with new ways to do something with petits fours,” said Christiansen. 

Some new flavor innovations have included snickerdoodle, salted caramel and pumpkin pie, the latter decorated with a dollop of white icing in homage to the pie’s traditional whipped cream topping. Though cheese-meat-pastry gift sets are Colony Brands’ most popular product, she said, petits fours are second.

Unfortunately, the 14th-seeded dessert was defeated in the first round of Manufacturing Madness by Generac’s DR Power 30” Wide Area Mower, the competition’s number three seed. But the petits fours still garnered 4,871 votes in that round of 16, more than almost every other edible contender, including Klarbrunn’s “Bucky’s Cherry Berry” sparkling water and Palermo Villa’s “Screamin’ Sicilian” pizza.