I mentioned that my oldest granddaughter was staying with us and wanted to make a welcome home cake for her mom and siblings. We had watched several episodes of the Next Great Baker and she was enthralled.
I have an awesome and easy vanilla cake recipe and I found a DIY fondant recipe, too. How challenging can this be? I thought.
So over the course of three days we set out to build an epic cake based on the lil baker's cake book. (Drawings, diagrams, plans sketched by the nine-year-old master chef.)
A square layer, a round layer and 4 cupcakes were baked and frozen for ease in frosting. On day 1.
Fondant made of marshmallows and an unholy amount of powdered sugar was put together on day 2. This was so easy. A big bowl, 4 cups of miniature marshmallows, 2 TBSP water and 4 plus cups of powdered sugar. Yep. That's right. Marshmallows and powdered sugar. You melt the marshmallows with the water in the microwave, stir it till smooth and begin adding powdered sugar one cup at a time. Then you sprinkle more powdered sugar on the surface of the table and begin kneading until it is no longer sticky, turning it over and folding it as needed until its all smooth.
Roll it out.
Lay it over the "dirty iced" (technical term learned from "reality" television in which a cake is iced with a thin layer of butter cream to set the fondant and cut down on crumbs) cake and smooth it out.
That's if you want white. If you want colors then warm up because you have the need to knead some more. Our creation needed four colors. So to be safe we doubled the batch above. (If you are local and have a need for marshmallow fondant which tastes eerily just like Lucky Charms marshmallows, come on over, we have some left.) Green, blue, lavender and orange. We used regular food color, no need for the heavy and more expensive paste. I was the sous chef mixing and kneading because the executive pastry chef lacked even more height than me and lacked the kneading hand muscles. This next step I will skip when attempting fondant in the future. We wrapped the little logs of fondant in plastic and chilled them once the colors were mixed.
The next day after we made the buttercream we began to work with the fondant. The much harder and firmer fondant. The little cake diva immediately assigned the rekneading to me. The rolling became mine as well. She work on the cutting and placement instead. More steps and the final creation tomorrow. My typing muscles took a beating from the fondant wars!
