Fondant Adventures and Graham Bread

Experimenting with the corners

cutting out dots

serving the cake with some friends over

I've been wanting to try cake decorating with fondant for a few months and decided Valentine's Day was a good excuse to give it a try. Usually I do the cake decorating on my own and with the exception of cleaning up, Ryan usually stays out of the way. This time he graciously offered to roll out the fondant. I was SO happy to have his help!

Overall my first fondant experiment was a success. I did learn some important lessons though. First lesson: do not try to heat up the fondant, even if it feels like a brick. This will only cause the fondant to become sticky. Second: do not add anything, other than water and vanilla extract, to the fondant. The texture of the fondant is very important. I added a little bit of cocoa powder, thinking it would make the fondant brown and add chocolate flavoring. Instead, it completely ruined the consistency and it was nearly impossible to use. I did manage to get a few brown circles for the cake, but not nearly as many as I had hoped. Third: the fondant can be (carefully) molded to fit even a square cake. I did not realize this when I started and tried to cut the corners to make the fondant fit. Only later did I google "fondant square cake" to find a YouTube video with instructions. I should have done that first!

I also tried a new cake recipe this time too. My aunt Judy recently sent me a cookbook called "Heavenly Cakes." It has so many delicious-sounding cakes that it was hard to pick just one, but I ended up going with a spice cake. It was delicious! Even though we had a few small mishaps with the fondant, I did love the final product (look at the Feb. 12 post to see a photo).

Ryan did more experimenting with the graham flour. He made a cinnamon raisin bread from the recipe on the back of the graham flour bag. The loaves came out perfect, so delicious!

Ryan kneading the graham bread

Cinnamon raisin graham bread - yum!