9.5.10

Covering Cakes With Fondant

Hey cake virgins!

Let's talk fondant. It can come in two forms. The one you may be most familiar with is rolled fondant, which is used to cover wedding cakes and give them that smooth, clean look. This cake, courtesy of Pink Cake Box, one of the blogs I follow, is covered with fondant. The gorgeous cherry blossom flowers are made of gum paste.
Pink Cake Box Cake
Poured fondant is a cream concoction used as a filling or coating for cakes, pastries and candies or sweets.

For the purpose of this blog, we are just going to discuss rolled fondant. Rolled fondant reminds me a lot of play-dough. The flexibility of fondant is what makes fondant so great as a cake covering. If it tears because you rolled it to thin, no biggie! You can mush it back together and roll it out again.

Before putting fondant on your cake, you need to cover it in buttercream icing. This works best with fondant. Not only does it help the fondant stick to the cake, but if you make a mistake and need to take the fondant off of your cake, you won't rip your cake to shreds.

For information on how to ice your cake properly, check out my previous post. In that post, I discussed crumb coating your cake. CRUMB COATING IS NOT THE COAT THAT YOU WOULD PUT FONDANT ON! If you do that, your fondant will look lumpy.

After the crumb coat, you put the cake in the fridge to cool. Once cooled, you take another bowl with a clean spatula and clean, crumb free frosting and coat the cake a second time. This layer will be crumb free and smooth. You can check out this video from Epicurious to show you how to make the top coat of icing.



Once you have a clean top coat of icing, we can start with the fondant. I found these steps off of Wilton, and have included a few of my own tips as well.  Step one would be to knead the fondant. You want it to be a workable consistency. If the fondant becomes to sticky, and is all over your hands and work station, knead in a little confectioner's sugar. You can also dust your work surface and your rolling pin with confectioners' sugar to prevent it from sticking everywhere else. It should be rolled out to the size of your cake. You want it to be able to cover both the top and sides of your cake.

The next step would be to gently lift the fondant over the rolling pin. Sprinkle confectioners' sugar on the top of the fondant to make sure it doesn't stick to itself. Then, all you do is position the fondant over your cake, just like you would if you were laying a table cloth on your kitchen table.

Nest, shape the fondant to the sides of your cake. It would be best to use a smoother here, as the pressure from your hands can leave impressions on the fondant. If you are light with your hands though, then the smoother isn't necessary. Starting in the middle of the cake top, you smooth outward and down the sides, removing air bubbles and smoothing as you go. If you do get an air bubble, insert a thin pin on an angle into the bubble, release the air and smooth the area again. Once the sides are covered, use a spatula or a sharp knife to trim the excess fondant.

And poof! You've just covered your first cake with fondant! You can move on to decorating the cake! We will start talking about some tips in later posts, but if you are eager to begin, you can check out videos on Epicurious and step-by-step instructions on Wilton.

Until next time cake virgins!

1 comments:

Mala said...

My fondant was lumpy and bumpy when I rolled it. What could be wrong?

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