DIY Cake Fondant

Last week I went to a dinner celebration for Relief Society at church. I got to decorate eight cakes for the centerpieces of the tables. EIGHT. (With a little help from my friend Angie, who wanted to learn how to make fondant.) 

Well, I don't have eight cake pans. So some wonderful other gals from church helped me out by baking a few. We used white cake batter and mixed Nerds into the cake batter to confetti it up a little, which tastes great too!

Thank goodness for this DIY fondant. It made everything go a lot faster and look a lot better. And it doesn't taste like the store bought fondant. It is better. This recipe is actually quite easy to do and only has 3 ingredients:

• One 16 oz. bag of mini marshmallows (mine has been 12 oz. and still worked)
• 2 TBS of water
• One 2 lb. bag of powdered sugar

Here is the how to:

Frost your cake with a layer of regular frosting. This is so that your fondant will stick, as well as give it a soft "pillow" for your fondant so it will look more smooth. The smoother, the better.

Take a microwave-safe bowl and put the whole bag of marshmallows in it. I use a large glass bowl. Pour the 2 Tbs. of water over top of the marshmallows. Put the bowl in the microwave for 30 seconds, stir, and repeat about four or five times until total cook time is about 2 or 2 1/2 minutes. When the marshmallows look smooth, dump pour (let's be a little more graceful) about 3/4 of the bag of powdered sugar into the bowl and stir. When it starts to thicken, grease up your hands real good with crisco/shortening and knead it into a ball. Take the ball out and lay it on a surfaced that has been covered with shortening. You can add water or powdered sugar to get your desired consistency. Now you can roll it out, add food coloring, and use cookie cutters, etc. to get the look that you want. It's almost just like playing with Playdough again. Ah, the good old days.

  I rolled my fondant out into a big circle, making sure that it would cover my cake.

 I used a pizza cutter to cut off the excess fondant.

You can totally get inspiration from other cakes too!
For a luau party, we Google image searched a surf board cake and found this:

The Party Dress

So we made this:

Well, I totally forgot to take pictures of all of the cakes we made before some people came to pick them up and take them to the dinner. When I finally arrived, I was only able to snag pictures of four of them!

There are a number of websites that have a similar recipe--if you want some tips on storing your fondant or getting rid of bubbles etc. here are a few good ones to visit:

What's Cooking America

Piece-A-Cake