How to Repair Fondant: Tips to Prepare and Foreclose Fondant Disasters

Cracked, lumpy, dry or torn fondant is an absolute nightmare when all you want is for things to go smoothly (pun intended). So many different factors from humidity and environs to an unfamiliar make of fondant tin can piece of work against y'all when information technology comes to covering cakes.

With our elevation tips for working with and preventing fondant disasters, your cake decorating experience is bound to be less bumpy!

Read on for our tips on repairing and preventing fondant disasters!

1. Focus on structure

Crumb Coated Cake Ready for FOndant

From Rachael Teufel's Covering Cakes in Fondant: Round, Square & Shaped

One of the first — and maybe most important — tips nosotros can offer to avoid any fondant mishaps is to get your bodily cake structure perfect. For super sleek covered cakes, you need super sleek crumb coated or ganache-covered cakes.

Make sure to utilise loftier-quality demote scrapers, turntables, palette knives, cake pans, and ingredients! Working with fondant is and then much easier when you lot chief the nuts first.

2. Find your favorite fondant

Fat Daddio's ProSeries Fondant

Different decorators adopt different qualities in their fondant, so test out lots of different brands and recipes. Once you find your favorite, stick to it.

Sometimes it's unavoidable if you're out of ingredients, time or if your usual brand is out of stock, simply be prepared! The texture of fondant is very important — exam fondant based on taste, appearance, texture, cost, ease of utilize, how information technology takes colour and consistency.

iii. Set those cracks

Rolling Fondant With Wooden Rolling Pin

A common fondant annoyance is finding your otherwise perfectly covered cake has unsightly cracks around the edges. This happens when your fondant begins to dry, due to either beingness overworked or being unprotected from the elements.

Here are a couple methods for preventing cracked fondant:

  • If you usually dust your surface with powdered sugar, swap to cornstarch or shortening, as these dry out fondant much less. Or endeavour a not-stick fondant rolling mat.
  • If you demand to add moisture into dry fondant before y'all've kneaded or rolled information technology, add either shortening or glycerine into the fondant.
  • Become creative and re-remember your blueprint. Sketches are easier to whip upwards than an actual finished cake, and so take a little artistic license and think on your feet. Add a fondant border, modify the positioning of a floral spray or recall about working your fondant misadventure into an attractive fondant texture (similar quilted fondant!).

4. Rub information technology in

Smoothing Cracks in Fondant

If your fondant has small cracks and you cannot recover your cake, try lightly rubbing the cracks in the opposite direction of the rifts. The heat from your fingers can make the fondant pliable enough to smooth over. Always smooth the fondant on the sides of your cake upwards, not downward!

If you're working on a white or ivory cake, you can lightly disguise the splits with a chip of vegetable shortening. Foursquare cakes are notoriously harder to cover with fondant due to the super sharp corners.

5. Utilise more than fondant than you demand

Trimming Fondant Around ROund Cake

Bumpy and awkward pleats creeping around the block's bottom can totally ruin a design. One smashing manner to avoid this is by using more fondant that you really need. Imagine icing a cake and finding that yous have 3″ more fondant than you need — and then imagine how neater your lesser edge with be because of this!

Pleats tend to happen when you encounter how trivial fondant you have around the perimeter of the cake earlier you've fifty-fifty really smoothed it to the sides. If yous have more fondant rolled out and ready, you accept more to play with.

Making certain that you whorl out and use more than fondant than needed is especially important with covering taller tiers. With larger tiers, rolling out a larger area of fondant is similar a helping manus!

Practise Makes Perfect!

I of the all-time and most of import pieces of communication we can offer is the age-old saying that practice makes perfect. Using dummy cakes is a good commencement due to the sharp corners and convenience, however, aught volition quite prepare you for covering cakes quite similar a real cake!

Hopefully, with these essential tips, your cake decorating feel volition become a smoother experience!