An industry standard for wedding cakes, fondant allows you to create classy, professional-looking baked goods to impress your friends, family and co-workers. Fondant is ideal for birthday cakes, holiday desserts, cookies and exotic candies. Regardless of whether you buy fondant at your local grocery store or make it yourself, these tips and tricks will help make working with fondant less of a challenge – allowing you to enjoy your hobby to the fullest.
Add Color to Fondant Icing
While white fondant is certainly classy, it lacks versatility. Fortunately, fondant absorbs color well. You can use basic food coloring for this project and create colorful fondant icing perfect for even the most flamboyant cake. This method works best if you’re making your own fondant, but food coloring can also be added to pre-made fondant.
Once you’ve completed your fondant, allow it to cool completely, roll it into a ball, and add several drops of the desired color. Knead the fondant until the color spreads evenly throughout the icing. The more fondant you‘re working with, the longer this process will take. You may need to repeat the fondant coloring process several times to obtain the correct shade. Gel food coloring works better with fondant than the liquid variety.
Add Extra Flavor to Fondant
If you’ve worked with fondant before, you already know that fondant isn’t typically as sweet as traditional cake icing – making it not as enjoyable for some diners. Your choices, however, aren’t limited to beautiful and bland or boring and tasteless. Consider adding flavoring to your fondant using the same method used for adding extra color. Exotic coffee flavorings work well for flavoring fondant.
Keep Your Fondant From Drying Out
Fondant dries and hardens remarkably quickly. Its imperative that you apply fondant quickly to your baked goods before it begins to harden. You can still make your fondant to use at a later date if you store it in plastic wrap sealed within a plastic bag. Place your fondant in the cabinet rather than the refrigerator, as refrigeration increases fondant’s moisture content – making it more difficult to work with.
Making a Striped Fondant Cake
Striped cakes are growing in popularity, and frequently rely on fondant for their clearly defined lines. When creating a striped fondant cake, separate two batches of fondant – one slightly smaller than the other. Color each fondant batch in the colors you want your cake to display. Choose a base color and a stripe color. The larger fondant batch should represent the base color, as this will be the fondant with which you will initially cover the cake.
After dressing the cake with the base fondant color, roll and flatten the second, smaller, batch of fondant. Cut the fondant into strips (you may wish to use a ruler for this, to ensure that your strips are the same exact size). Dipping your finger into a dish of water, dampen the area on the base fondant that you intend to lay the stripe. Because wet fondant ends up shiny and unattractive when it dries, take care to dampen only areas that will be covered by your stripes.
Press each colored fondant strip firmly in place after dampening the base fondant sections. Do not dampen the base fondant until you are ready to apply a colored strip. Fondant dries quickly and, once a wet section dries, dampening it again will not provide you with the same “sticky” effect.
Giving Fondant Icing a Marbled Appearance
Cakes, cookies and other baked goods that boast a marbled fondant exterior may look unimaginably difficult, but giving fondant a marbled effect is so easy you can even invite your children to help you.
Roll two separate colored batches of fondant icing into long, thin strips. Each time you do this project, you can experiment with the length and thickness of the strips to find the marbled effect you like best. Twist the strips together until you have a rudimentary braid and fold the braid in half. Rolling out the braided strips at this point and using them to cover your cakes, cookies and candies leaves these food products with a basic marbled pattern.
Keep in mind that you can fold and re-twist your fondant strips as many times as you like before finally rolling them out into the completed fondant pattern. The more you twist and fold the strips of icing, the more “marbled” the finished product will be.
Decorating With Fondant As a Hobby
It may take you some experimentation before you find the methods that work best for you. While all professionals have their own tips and tricks, those methods may not be either convenient or fun for you and your family. Even if you’ve been working with fondant for years, however, consider taking a fondant class to brush up on your skills and maybe even learn something new that you can apply to your future fondant creations.
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