Robyn's Fondant Birthday Cake

Made my first cake using fondant. It turned out okay. I don't really know why I thought it would be any different, but molding with fondant is pretty much like molding with clay. If you stink with clay, you stink with fondant. It was a really fun, challenging project for me though.

I did the cake for my sister-in-law's birthday (happy birthday!) and it tasted pretty good, which is the most important part :)

The cake itself was a marble cake made from 2 boxed cake mixes; dark chocolate and french vanilla. It's super easy. You just make the two mixes separately (or, if you're going all out, you just make two cake mixes from scratch), then pour part of one in the pan, part of the other in lines on top, then take a knife and criss-cross through the batter. Don't stir, just criss-cross to make a pattern. Sorry, no picture.

While your cakes are cooling (in the fridge, to make them hard), that's when you start making the fondant stuff. I tried making the candles completely edible by wrapping Pirouettes with fondant, but they weren't stable enough. So I wrapped wooden dowels and then cut strips for the lines on the candles. Fondant is pretty easy to roll out--you just need to have a bunch of powdered sugar and cornstarch to roll it out on to.

I didn't know this, but you use a little bit of water mixed with some dissolved fondant, and you use it as glue to hold stuff together--really neat :) You let the fondant decorations harden while you're getting the rest of your cake ready.

I made a homemade vanilla-flavored butter-cream frosting to build the cake with. Mix all the wet stuff, then add the meringue and sugar in increments.

• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1 cup shortening
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 tablespoons milk or water
• 1 tablespoon meringue powder

I bought a frosting tip that is huge for putting a layer of frosting onto the cake so you don't tear it up trying to get it even. It looks like this, only the opening is about 2 inches long:
So you just frost the cake, then roll out your fondant and put it on top, smoothing out all the surfaces and trimming it up. Then I stuck in my candles, made curly-cues, stuck those in, and dotted on some royal icing to hold it all together. Royal icing is different than butter-cream. Royal icing starts out runny, and gets thicker as you beat it, then gets hard a few minutes after you use it. It consists of:

• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 3 tablespoons meringue powder
• 1-2 tablespoons water

Then you finish by making a border to hide the trim-line of the fondant.

Then you eat it :) And it's yummy. I think next time I'll stick with making less intricate stuff out of fondant--Stuff I can use cookie cutters for and straight lines :) It took me a bit of time to get used to working with the fondant--especially when you wet it down to glue stuff together. So be sure to plan on your kitchen getting destroyed in the process, and your hands being sticky the whole time--then you should be good :) I think I cleaned my kitchen 3 times that day.

If you're looking for good cake ideas, Joann's website and Wilton's website have GREAT ideas and tips and places to start. That's where I got my ideas this time.