Fun with Fondant and a Giveaway

You know those big beautiful cakes that you see on all those reality baking shows? With all the different shapes and colors of fondant? I’ve honestly never had ambitions to make anything like that. But I’ve also never given it a shot. When Megan from Delicious Dishings and I were talking about our latest baking date, the idea was thrown out there to play with fondant. We figured it would be a fun first to tackle together.

And, to sweeten the deal, the lovely people at King Arthur Flour offered to send us each a tub of their white fondant to play with. In preparations for our fun with fondant day, I baked up a couple cake layers for each of us (we also decorated some cupcakes, that post will be coming later).

Megan decided to make a fall themed cake, while I decided to make a pink ribbon cake. I had great great ambitions in my mind of what this cake would look like. I wanted a big fat pink swirled ribbon draped over the entirety of my cake. But let me back up a minute.

First, we frosted our cakes with some buttercream. We let the cakes chill in the fridge for a bit while we each rolled out some fondant. To coat the cake, we rolled the fondant fairly thin, about 1/8″ thick. To get the rolled out fondant onto my cake, I folded my fondant in quarters, laid it on top of the cake and unfolded it. This was my first mistake of the day. When I unfolded the fondant, it had little seams in it from the fold. I had hoped to be able to smooth them out, but wasn’t able to. Next time, I’d roll the fondant onto the rolling pin and unroll onto the cake.

The next step was to press down the fondant on the sides of the cake. Megan ended up cutting part of her fondant out and I went with the approach of just continuing to press it down and try to smooth it out. Both strategies ended up working, although we both had some uneven fondant on our cakes.

Next cake the decorations. We both took a small portion of fondant and put a few drops of gel food coloring into it. With our hands, we kneaded the fondant until the color was dispersed. Then we played around with the marbling. I’m sure Megan has some intermediate pictures, but I didn’t get any that day. I basically took a small ball of dark pink and a small ball of light pink. I divided each ball in half and rolled them into a long snake. Then I basically laid the ropes out and twisted them together. Then I just rolled the colors together and flipped and kept rolling and flipping until I got a swirl in my fondant. I rolled out a very large piece and just cut out the pink ribbon with a knife.

I draped the pink ribbon over the cake and I loved it instantly! That’s when I discovered my second mistake (or maybe it was my first in reality). You see, my cake layers were frozen at the beginning of the day. They were defrosting while the plain white fondant sat on the cake. This resulted in my white fondant sweating as the cake layers cooled. This was great in the fact that the pink ribbon stuck to the white fondant without any additional aid.

I then decided that the cake felt a little naked. So I mixed my swirled pink fondant with some white fondant to make more swirls. Then I made the dots to decorate the rest of the cake. I think it turned out pretty nicely for my first fondant cake. I’m not sure I’ll be making any big masterpieces in the near future, but it sure was fun to try something new with a friend.

And NOW, after all of that, comes the good part. The giveaway. King Arthur Flour has generously offered one lucky reader of mine and Megan’s the chance to try playing with fondant themselves. I will choose one entry at random to win one tub of white fondant.

Rules for Giveaway:
– Be sure to follow King Arthur Flour either on Facebook, Twitter, or by subscribing to their newsletter (check the lower right hand corner of their website)
– Leave a comment by 11:59PM (EST) on Friday October 7th answering this question – What do you think about fondant? Love it? Hate it? Peel it off before digging in? Eat it all up?
– Only one entry per person
– US or Canada shipping addresses only

Don’t worry, I’ll post more about the inside of this cake shortly. This post is long enough already…

Don’t forget about my Power of Pink Challenge – make something PINK by the end of the month to raise Breast Cancer Awareness!