How to Make Decorating Fondant for Cake Art

Fondant is like edible modeling clay. It can be shaped, colored, cut or molded. It can turn a plain cake into a work of art. If you've seen Ace of Cakes you've seen fondant in use. A baker can make real works of art with the use of a little fondant.

However, commercial fondant can be expensive and frankly, doesn't taste very good. With some experimentation, much of it very messy, quite unappetizing and downright dangerous - I've come up with a simple and inexpensive alternative to commercial fondant that is surprising easy to work with.

I strongly recommend mess proofing your work area before you begin making fondant. I do this by laying down plastic or parchment paper - everywhere. I also keep wet paper towels on hand, ready for sticky cleanups.

Ingredients:

1 cup of mini marshmallows, packed tightly
1 - 1.5 cups of powdered sugar
4 teaspoons of water
cooking oil to grease up your hands
extra powdered sugar for rolling out the fondant

Method:

Mix the mini marshmallows with the water in a microwave safe bowl, coating them as evenly as possible with the liquid. Then microwave the mixture for ten seconds. Stir it to check for readiness - if all the lumps are gone once you stir it up, it is ready for the next step. If there are still lumps microwave it again for another ten seconds. Stir until the lumps are gone. If you need to microwave it longer be very, very watchful and use very short increments of time as the mixture can easily be over cooked and become stringy.

Once you are able to stir out all the lumps add the powdered sugar in small batches to the hot marshmallow mixture stirring vigorously. Be very careful as this mixture may be extremely hot and sticky. Trust me; it burns like the dickens if you get it stuck to your skin. It may not seem like all the sugar will stir into the marshmallows but I assure you, it will.

Once you've gotten all the powdered sugar stirred in allow the mixture to cool enough to be touched. Then grease your hands with a cooking oil and knead the mixture until it is smooth and somewhat similar in consistency to Play-Doh. If the fondant feels sticky instead of doughy, continue to add more powdered sugar until it feels doughy.

Now you can either use the fondant right away or store it for later use. To store it, wrap the fondant tightly in plastic wrap and seal in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Allow the fondant to come to room temperature before using.

To use the fondant, generously powder your working surface with powdered sugar and rub powdered sugar on the ball of fondant. Using a greased and powdered rolling pin, flatten the fondant, checking often to be sure the fondant doesn't stick to your work surface. You should be able to roll the fondant out into a very thin layer which you can use to carefully cover your cake. I recommend using a traditional frosting in a light color to serve as an adhesive before applying the fondant. This recipe makes more than enough fondant to cover an 8-9" round cake or a similar surface area.

Notes:

If you want colored fondant - and you probably do - you'll want to add your food coloring with the water before microwaving your marshmallows. Otherwise the coloring comes out streaky and uneven. Use liquid food coloring as part of your 4 teaspoons of water, not in addition to it. It's a matter of trial and error, how much coloring you need to use. You can also make flavored fondant as well. Flavoring can be added with the powdered sugar if flavoring oil is used.

For the cake in the photograph I used peppermint flavoring in the green fondant which I made into grass. It turned out rather tasty. To make the black fondant I added black food coloring to the water step and four tablespoons of cocoa powder to the powdered sugar step to avoid too strong a food coloring taste. The tiger orange fondant was made by adding orange food coloring and half a teaspoon of cocoa powder. I painted in the shadows and details with food coloring applied to the fondant with a new, clean paintbrush.

To shape the fondant decorations you can either mold them with your hands as if out of clay, you can cut them out with cookie cutters, or use a knife to cut out custom shapes as I did for the tiger cake. An exacto knife coated with cooking oil on its cutting blade works very well to cut out designs in this fondant.

The important thing is to have fun and make some interesting cake art.