Rolled Fondant

The picture you see here is a dummy cake that I decorated in class today. The idea was to practice coloring rolled fondant and applying it to the cake, and decorating with royal icing.

Rolled fondant is basically decorative, and although you can eat it, most people don't really like the taste. Basically, it tastes like sugar. My lovely wife Ali says it tastes like marshmallow.

So, Chef Laura showed us a bunch of different techniques for decorating with royal icing, and wanted us to do as many as we could on our dummy cake for practice. So, on the other side of this cake, it is decorated very differently, with lots of string work using the royal icing. I liked this side better, so that's the side you get to see on my blog. All of the flowers, and the purple border, are made of royal icing. Royal icing is very stiff, and dries very quickly, which makes it ideal for this type of decorating. Once dry, it is very hard, and when piped thinly it is very brittle. The purple flowers and the white daisies were piped yesterday, then applied today when dry.

I was actually pretty happy with this side of my cake, and even received a lot of compliments in class, including a "Dude, that's awesome!" You gotta like that. My wife liked it because the colors will match our baby-to-be's bedroom... awe, ain't that cute???