How to Make Fondant for Cake or Cake Pops

A few weeks ago Karrie tried making cake pops, where you attach sticks to balls of cake then dip them into melted chocolate. While looking up how to do that, she saw a lot of videos on how to make your own fondant cake. Fondant is a type of dough like frosting which consists of marshmallows and powdered sugar. It can be rolled flat then draped over a cake to create a smooth surface. So here is what it looked like to make a fondant cake.

But actually making the fondant is pretty simple. It's basically just 3 main ingredients, lots of work mixing and rolling, but when you're done you end up with something like this.

So back to the beginning. Here's Karrie's ingredients and list of steps. She read a lot more about it and watched several Youtube videos.

Here are all the ingredients set out.

The first step is to bake the cake. This was used as the bottom layer of a 2 layer cake.

No for making the fondant. Add 1 tablespoon of water and microwave the marshmallows for 1:30. When they come out of the microwave they look the same, but when you start stirring them they turn mushy and are very sticky.

Here's what the stirred up marshmallows look like. Next you pour them into the bowl of powdered sugar.

Stir everything together well. This is the tough part, making sure all the powdered sugar is incorporated.

Dump it out onto the counter.

Then start kneading it like bread dough. And use the powdered sugar to keep it from sticking. But don't use too much or else it drys it out. That seemed to be the trickiest part. The balance between too sticky and too dry.

Almost done kneading. That flat plastic scraper tool was great to clean off the counter from sticky fondant.

When you are done it is very smooth and fairly soft.

Cover it with Saran wrap so it doesn't dry out. At this stage it can be stored for a long time, several weeks i think.

Here's the pattern for the cake.

Cutting it out the pattern with a special serrated cake knife.

Here's the final shape of the base. There was lots of scrap pieces as well.

This was the 2nd (top) layer of the cake. There was enough room on this cake to use a cookie cutter and make star shapes. They could be used to make fondant cup cakes.

Now it was time to dye the fondant. We separated the fondant to different size pieces and add water based dye to get the color. It didn't take much, maybe 10-15 drops depending on the size.

To even out the dye, the fondant was kneaded and rolled out. Again watch out that you don't use too much powdered sugar.

Then Karrie cut out different shapes with a cookie cutter. They would be used to decorate the cake.

All of the small fondant pieces cut out.

This was the cake covering for the bottom layer. It was suppose to be purple but combining yellow and blue came out a bit dark. This picture makes it look gray but it was more of a dark purple.

And this was where we learned about getting the fondant too dry. It wasn't pliable enough and when we tried to form it into the tight corners it started to crack. If we would have been making a big round smooth cake it would have been ok but sharp edges were tricky.

But after it was smoothed out it looked fine.

And Karrie did some creative decorating to hide the cracks.

This is the top layer of the cake. Karrie is about to lay the fondant over it. This time we knew to keep the fondant soft and a little bit sticky.

It was a lot easier to form to the cake shape. Then using a knife, Karrie cut off the excess.

Then she took that excess fondant, kneaded and rolled it out, and cut out additional shapes.

Here are those cut out pieces being added to the cake.

Just adding some final touches. As you can see there's lots of extra pieces and quite a mess.

Here is the finished cake. The key is with the moisture of the fondant. Too wet and it's sticky like a melted marshmallow. Too dry and it starts to crack.

I think the cool part is the rounded edges and being able to basically create any smooth shape you want.

It turned out great for the first time making a fondant cake.