We had a four day long class about contemporary wedding cakes, so we played with rolled fondant, gum paste, and the like. A guest Instructor, who owns a pastry shop and wedding cake business in the area, came in to teach us for two of those days.

Here are some things that we learned:

• You need to crumb coat your cake before applying the rolled fondant to it. The crumb coat should be perfectly smooth and even, with no shadows from the cake showing (or else it’ll show through the fondant). Since you need to chill the crumb coat so that it firms up a little, you can also smooth it out more precisely once out of the fridge since you’ll have more control over the firm icing.
• You can make your own rolled fondant (especially if you want it taste good), but many wedding cake makers buy it. We were advised to stay away from fondants with ingredients that end in “-ice” (such as regalice, satinice, pettinice, etc) and patisfrance because they are gritty and taste bad; they generally can be rolled very thin, but their ensuing transparency isn’t desirable either). Instead, she recommended Massa Grischuna and Massa Ticino. Wilton is okay, too.
• Fondant is hydroscopic (it attracts moisture), so air and moisture will affect it.
• Modeling Chocolate can also be used to cover a cake, and it often tastes better than fondant. It’s firmer, though, so you have to sheathe the top and sides of the cakes separately, and then close the seam smoothly with your fingers. You have to keep in mind that white chocolate has a yellow color when you add coloring to it; for instance, adding pink will get you peach.
• French buttercream should only be used to fill a cake — it’s too soft to put on the outside. Italian buttercream can be used for either.
• As a wedding cake maker, you can always re-invent yourself… because there’s rarely repeat business.
• If you can get an exclusive deal to make all wedding cakes for a hotel or retail store, that’s good.
• Gum paste flowers usually take at least a day to dry. Gum paste is desirable for this b/c it can be rolled very thin.

We were to decorate one real cake and one styrofoam cake during this block. I was sick one day, so I only decorated one real cake. I just wanted to get a feel for how the fondant acted, so this was a start…

It’s no secret that I loathe making pure decor stuff, so my cake was the wedding cake for people who don’t like wedding cakes. The only thing that I really wanted to get right was to have a perfectly smooth layer of white fondant… no tears, or scratches, or bumps. And I did it. I attribute some of that to my enthusiasm for rolling tart dough. Anyway, what you do is roll out the fondant on a mix of cornstarch and powdered sugar (you can make a little tied baggy from cheesecloth), and then go over it with a fondant smoother. If there are little air bubbles, gently prick them with a toothpick and smooth over them; the air bubbles usually found by running your hand over the fondant than by sight. Once you put the fondant over the cake, you smooth it again and make sure that it’s snug against the cake. To trim it, you run a pizza cutter around it, at an angle so that it doesn’t scrape against the fondant. You need to put something around the border to cover the seam.
To color fondant (and marzipan), you color a small batch, and then use pieces of that as seeds for coloring other batches of fondant.

For the rope, you just twist together two strands of fondant, and then roll them so that they flatten out. I think it looks much better like that than unrolled.

For the Flowers That Do Not Exist In Nature, you roll a rectangle of fondant, fold it in half, and then roll it up, slightly spiralled, and then pull apart the edges a little. I made a whole bunch more, but I also wanted some degree of proportion on this modest cake, so only three of them were needed. They were secured to the cake with toothpicks. The leaves were made with molds.

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