Hi, I'm Katie, and I'm going to show you how
to fondant a cake.
So I'm starting with a nice blob of white
fondant, this is just a vanilla fondant, and
I've kneaded it into submission.
You could see it's nice and soft, very pliable.
What you're looking for is almost like a soft
Play-doh, you really want to be able to kind
of roll it out and cut it and shape it as
you need.
But you could see my cake is already ready
to go.
I just gave ma cake a little bit of a crumb
coat, that's when you do a light layer, you
can almost see the cake through.
The goal is not to put a ton of frosting,
especially when you're putting fondant on
top, you really just want something for it
to stick to, and you also of course want the
flavor of a little bit of frosting too.
But you could see very light layer all the
way around, nice and even, and now I'm ready
to go.
So the tools I need are, I have my rolling
pin, I have a sifter with a little bit of
confection sugar, or you could use corn starch,
I have what's called a fondant smoother thing,
that's not what it's called, but that's what
I'm calling it right now, and I'm just going
to use it to smooth out my surface, and a
little paring knife to trim my edges, and
that's it, and then it's just your muscles.
So I'm going to give my surface a nice sift
of confection sugar, this is to keep my fondant
from sticking as I roll, and same thing on
top, it's almost as if you are rolling out
a pie dough, same idea.
I'm going to be working and moving it constantly.
If you see any bits of anything, you want
to make sure your counters are really clean,
but if they're not, just kind of kick out
any crumbs that will tarnish the look of your
fondant as you go.
Remember constant moving, it's not only keeping
it from sticking, but also if you keep rotating
as you turn, as you roll, it will create a
circle instead of creating a large square,
if I were to just shift it by 90 degrees,
so just constantly move it around.
And what we're looking for is about an eighth
of an inch, which is very thin.
If you're in the kitchen and you don't have
a ruler, and you're wondering what is an eighth
of an inch, if you look at kind of the top
portion of your thumb, it's usually about
an inch, unless you have really big hands,
so that's about half of that is half an inch,
your nails is about a little more than a quarter
of an inch, so we're aiming for an eighth,
a very small, thin layer.
So going to just keep rolling, and fondant
definitely takes a lot of strength.
Imagine doing huge wedding cakes and trying
to cover gigantic surfaces, it gets tiring,
so pastry chefs have such good muscles.
Keep moving it around.