Fondant is notorious for drying out quickly. If you live in Brisbane and are cake decorating in the summer months you will see just how quickly fondant will dry out and become unusable.
When fondant dries out it starts to crack and becomes really difficult to shape and keep together. Anyone who’s covered a cake to unfortunately see a crack in their fondant knows how difficult that can be to fix. Yes you can make up a gunge to cover up your ‘crackly little secret’ but it can sometimes not come out right so it’s much easier to make sure you get it right in the first place.
Enter Gladwrap - When you’re using fondant make sure that you cover any fondant that’s not being worked in Glad Wrap or Cling Film. This will ensure that your fondant will never go dry and will always be workable.
Hot Tip - If the top of your cake starts going dry when you’re icing it you can get a little bit of solid vegetable shortening (only use a tiny bit) and smooth out the rough edges with your smoother.
When working with fondant, particularly in humid conditions like we get in Queensland it’s a good idea to have a dusting pouch on hand when working. These are a simple and elegant solution to eliminating the fondant sticking to things (your hands, the bench, the rolling pin etc). It’s a simple little dusting bag that you fill with cornflour or icing sugar (personally I find cornflour works better) and you dust your fondant icing with it when your hands start getting a little sticky from working the icing.
Hot Tip - A clean hanky and a rubber band is a great alternative to a store bought dusting bag. If however you would like a high quality dusting bag that is easy to use and dispenses the cornflour perfectly every time you can buy one here!
The weather can and will affect your fondant and how it works in your hands, on the bench and with a rolling pin. Humid weather will make your fondant sticky and it will be hard to work with as it will stick to pretty much everything! (remember for sticky fondant you can use your trusty dusting bag) and if it’s really cold, the fondant will go hard making it difficult to work with.
If you’re lucky and have an air conditioned environment to work in and the temperature and air humidity is going to be constant, then you probably won’t have to face these issues, but for the rest of us, keeping an eye on the weather is a great way to ensure you’re not working twice as hard to get your cakes decorated.
Hot Tip - As frustrating as it is, I’ve been known to wait a day for the weather to improve if I have an important fondant decoration to work on.
As a general rule it’s a good idea when you’re first starting out to get your cakes to room temperature before you start icing them. When a cake is removed from the fridge it starts warming up, this can cause the cake to move, expand a little and let out trapped pockets of gas (we call them cake farts, he he) that will create bubbles, ripples and movement through your fondant icing.
There are some people that refrigerate cakes successfully throughout the decoration process however, these are usually people with a little more experience and are using top shelf products.
Hot Tip - Depending on how hot or humid it is I usually allow between 1-2 hours for a cake to get to room temperature from a fridge.
Fondant is one of those food items that needs to be treated with a delicate touch. It’s almost like making hollandaise sauce – if you overdo it... even a little bit, it can be ruined.
When you’re kneading your fondant, do it with a deft and light touch and when incorporating colour, knead it only as much as needed to get the colour to a consistent level.
If you’ve let your fondant dry out, beware – it will crack. There’s nothing worse than seeing your beautiful creation suddenly look like a B+ instead of an A because cracks start to appear. Dry fondant tends to crack around the corners and is notoriously hard to fix, so keep your cakes out of the sun, away from the window in summer and don’t decorate in the desert :-)
If you’re making dark colours like brown, purple, black or red, it’s a good idea to make this up the day before so the icing has time to relax and rest. Giving the fondant an opportunity to rest will make it easier to work with (it will be very soft after you’ve been working with it).
We all have a wooden or marble rolling pin lying around and these are great, if however you’re just starting out working with fondant, a non-stick rolling pin is a godsend. Not only will you find it easier to roll out your fondant, there’s less chance it will stick and make a mess of your icing.
We recommend using Loyal Non-Stick Rolling Pins
Crumb Coating a cake involves adding a thin layer of buttercream to your cakes before you add the fondant to it. Doing this will smooth out any imperfections on the cake before you add the icing (trust us, fondant can be VERY unforgiving on dimples, ridges and bumps).
There’s a million and one articles, videos, interviews and how to’s on the web about using fondant and cake decorating in general. Some of them are incredibly helpful – others not so much.
By all means use the internet to watch videos on how to do stuff and read up all you can to make yourself more knowledgeable, but remember, nothing beats doing it yourself and having a go.