Sweet Sweet 4th

Crystal has been doing some research recently on fancy cake decorating and how they do it for wedding cakes and such of the like. For the fourth, she decided to try her hand at it to see what it's really like. Here is the butter cream frosting that she made from scratch (a more appropriate name for it would just be 'sugar butter' - guess the ingredients!)


Next came the fondant. Fondant is the thicker frosting that surrounds professional cakes. It's usually the colored parts and because it's so thick, it is what people use for doing things like tying bows out of frosting. Actually it's pretty much all they use for decorating the cake. After you make it you gotta wrap it up and keep it cold.


The amazing thing about fondant is that it's exactly like play dough. When it's not hot, it's not sticky at all and you just fold and manipulate it to do what you want. We folded in some food coloring to get different colors.


Here I am rolling out the fondant. You take it out of the fridge, nuke it for 10-20 seconds, then roll it out like dough. You then take it like a giant sheet, lay it over the cake, and wrap it around tucking it in at the bottom. This is how/why professional cakes look so smooth and uniform over the frosting - the secret is using a sheet of fondant.


We then used our colored fondant to decorate the cake. Now ours is a three tier, which was apparently to much grandeur for a first time cake. We either needed less cake...or more fondant (guess which I would prefer!). Because we had not enough fondant, we had to roll it out thinner than it was supposed to be so that when we went to put it over the cake (having to hold it up in the air) it ripped in a few places, and we had to try to patch them over - which didn't go so well. All the decorations were done with our homemade fondant. Anyways, it was our first attempt at it so be kind, but here is our final product: (And I bet Leanna really wants us to do her future wedding cake now, doesn't she!)

From the side

From the top

C and me, and yes I am holding a hot dog in my hand. On Crystal's hand you can see her ring because two years ago yesterday I proposed to her.

And Crystal holding the delicious cake.

She also wanted me to add that "We're not eating this by ourselves!" Guess I gotta go make some friends now...that's always easier with cake, right?

She also wanted me to add the link she used for the recipe for the icings


Crystal's Edit:
Here is a video if you want to see someone who knows what they're doing and how cool fondant is! :-)