Display Cakes Week 5

This week, we worked with fondant. We make ours from scratch--it costs much less to make it than buy it. Incidentally, a pound of fondant is about $20-ish.

We filled the cakes with buttercream and applied the crumb coat (the usual procedure) and put the cakes in the fridge to let it set.

Chef did a demo on how to roll out the fondant, covering the cake, then stretching the cornersto make nice edges.

The excess is trimmed off with a pizza cutter.

We mixed tylose into the fondant to make a gum paste, which can be shaped into flowers and figurines for decoration. I shaped mine into a flower and an origami crane. Now it was time to cover my cake...

....phew. It took me three tries. The first time, I didn't have enough fondant to cover the cake, so I had to pull it off. Second time, I didn't roll it out thin enough. The third time, it turned out I had just barely enough to cover the cake. By this time, the buttercream was starting to soften/melt, so the cake ended up with rounded edges instead of nice, clean corners. But I still managed to cover the thing. That was frustrating...

Then we practiced stencilling on the fondant. Any stencil can be used here. We put the stencil up against the cake, applied a thin layer of colored royal icing, and peeled the stencil off. I did a pink polka-dot put fondant ribbons to make a gift box.

Afterward, I donated this to the Food Bank. There was no way my family could've eaten this 20-lb. cake.