Fondant....Friend or Foe?

OK people, prepare to be amazed! I did some baking this past weekend (stop laughing) and some of it went surprisingly well...some of it, not so much. As most of you well know, I don't cook and baking, as far as I'm concerned, is cooking. However I have dabbled here and there when I find something I think is cool, or, as in this case, I WATCH TOO MUCH TV AND THINK I CAN DO ANYTHING! I love the show "Ace of Cakes"...they make amazing cakes and more importantly, they make it look sooooo easy! My first mistake was to even entertain the idea that I might possibly be able to make a beautiful fondant cake. Well, I knew we were celebrating my Mom's birthday yesterday and since we are on a very limited budget at the moment, and since my Dad said he would buy dinner and I could take care of the cake....I thought, "why not?". So I spent Friday night online, reading about using, making and decorating with fondant. You Tube has many awful, deceptive videos of people showing you how EASY it is to use fondant. By the time I finished watching and reading everything, I was ready to start my own fondant cake business! It was so simple...I mean I know I hadn't even made the cake yet, but it was so easy....right? Well it took me two days to make the cake and by the time I was done (literally an hour before my Mom arrived) I never wanted to see fondant again....until the next cake! I'm going to take you through a quick journey of my fondant follies. The first photo is actually one of the highlights of my weekend with fondant. A mini fondant rose...which I made! Do you believe it? I still can't believe I made it...I will show you how to make it later. I started by making the cakes - my Mom loves chocolate cake so that's what I made. Somehow I made the determination it would be round...from what I read it seemed it was more difficult to smooth the fondant over the corners of the square cakes. Also somewhere along the line, Jamie and Bethany became consultants on the cake project and they decided it was going to have 3 layers. Those girls, they really know how to challenge their Mom....and they know how to make me laugh....the eggs were innocently sitting on the counter one minute...I ran to put a laundry in, and when I returned....

I did a double take and then heard the giggling down the hall. Comic relief is very important when I cook and I'm sure they could see I was in need of some. I get too serious when I cook - I guess it's because I don't cook, so when I do, I have to follow every direction to the letter - I'm not very good at improvising...

For example, one of the videos I watched had someone making a layered fondant cake - each tier had two layers with butter cream frosting in between all layers. So here are some of the tiers for my cake. Those 2 big cakes are the 2 bottom layers and one of these small cakes was sliced in half (I cut the top half off), frosted then put back together and frosted again. I didn't end up using the other small cake - in my fondant delirium I was actually going to make a separate mini fondant cake for my Mom to take home....yeah...right.

Here are my 3 tiers, each with two layers. It doesn't matter that there's all kinds of chocolate cake crumbs in the frosting because it's going to be covered with fondant so no one will see. I was very generous with the frosting - and many of the videos and articles said it should be butter cream frosting - I have no idea why but who the hell am I to question it, right? So I frosted once, put in fridge for a few hours, removed and frosted again. Saw it on YouTube....that's why.

Now there is a canyon of a gap here between photos. I tried to spare you the whole, "Fondant is so expensive to buy, I'll just make my own" segment. Really, I can't tell you how many liars are on the web saying how EASY it is to make the marshmallow fondant...how EASY it is to use...blah blah blah. I made 4 different batches....one of them I kneaded it by hand. You have no idea how sticky this stuff is...then realizing you forgot to get a piece of plastic wrap before you started kneading so now you have sticky fondant all over the plastic wrap box, not to mention the plastic wrap itself. I learned a lot about fondant this past weekend. It is NOT my friend was the #1 thing. Others are: wrap the fondant unless cutting a chunk off, do not put in the fridge, it takes FOREVER to kneed in the tint color, once you cut designs out of fondant, use them very soon....as they will harden and then break when you go to put them on your cake...or so I heard...cuz I wouldn't do that, being a fondant expert and all.

So earlier in the day, the girls decided the cake would be shades of blue so those are the tint colors we bought. It comes in a gel - don't try to use the food coloring you buy at the grocery store - those are water based and will change the fondant and you might not be able to use it....or so a high school girl told me at the store. She was buying fondant stuff too and seemed very knowledgeable. I probably watched one of her YouTube videos....

So, it's now almost midnight and Bethany has stayed up with me kneading and rolling out the fondant and we finally have all three tiers covered. We rolled it out too thin so it doesn't look all smooth and pretty like it's supposed to. I have cursed so much that even though we aren't at church Beth is praying for me. She actually got the little massage thingy and was messaging my back while I was working...telling me to relax, it'll be OK. Then, after I thought I was all done, Bethany, in a very scared voice, pointed to the side of one of the tiers, the side I couldn't see from where I was standing. Poor thing, she looked like she was afraid my eyes were going to start shooting flames. But there it was, a big 'ol gap where the fondant was not covering the side of the cake. I wrapped them in plastic and called it a night. I had no energy to deal with it right then and there.

I apologize for the lighting/big shadow in this photo - I was all about the cake and not so much about the photos at this point. Jamie and Bethany have helped me tint and cut fondant ribbon for each tier. This was my fix for the big gap on the bottom tier where there was no fondant...brilliant! Now, you can see all the flaws. My fondant is bumpy, the ribbon is uneven. This gave me great stress, but this is the sacrifice in allowing the girls to help me with the cake. I do it because I want the girls to have fun and I always think I will enjoy doing this stuff with them, but truthfully, I think I'm just too anal and it stresses me out. I can laugh about it now, but at the time I was wishing there was a champagne fountain on top of this cake!

Here are the fondant flowers the girls cut out...I bought a 3 piece set for $2.50 at Michaels. It had 3 sizes so you can layer them, which is what we did. Unfortunately we left them on these plates like this for a while and when we were ready to layer them and put them on the cake they were hard. The petals on some of them cracked and broke or threatened to brake...thankfully I also read online if this happens to take a small bit of shortening and kind of message the fondant back together....and it worked!

OK, now I'm going to show you how I made the mini fondant roses. Start by rolling a small piece of fondant into a ball. That's my finger so you can see about how big...and actually you could go smaller...but you kind of figure it out as you go along.

Ooops! this step and the next one are swapped, but that's OK. You flatten the fondant ball in between plastic wrap so it's like a thin pancake. To start the rose, you roll the first "pancake" as shown in this picture...just roll it up like a rug.

This picture didn't come out so good, but this is the ball of fondant, flattened between plastic wrap. Not sure why, but so sayeth the YouTube video and we all know I have to follow directions, so just get a piece of plastic wrap!

Now just keep flattening balls of fondant and layering the "pancakes" around the original rolled up one. I probably used about 10 "pancakes" for each rose. Tedious, yes. Amazing, yes. Hard to do, no.

I only made 6 for my Mom's cake due to time constraints, but they are really cool.
So we layered the cut out flowers and bought silver dragees - no idea why they are called that - basically they are silver, edible balls used as baking decorations - to put in the center of the flowers. Use dabs of water to make fondant stick to itself - water makes it start to disintegrate I guess...so to stick the flowers to each other and to the cake, use water.

Here is the finished product:

The layered flowers did a nice job of hiding many flaws.

My Mom walked in, oohh'd and ahh'd over it and promptly broke off some flower petals and ate them! Bethany could see the flames coming out of my eyes and ran....literally the cake was finished an hour before my Mom destroyed it. Yes, it was her cake, as she so cleverly pointed out, and yes, it was her birthday as she again pointed out. Ugh.

Here is the cake after Bethany got to it and lit it all up for her Grammy.

Those people on YouTube are fondant wizards with the way they make it look so easy. I didn't do too bad for my first time, but Ace of Cakes I'm not!