Kylyssa's Fondant Cakes

All men are created equal - but the same is not true of fondants. Most hand made fondant is of a neutral but sweet flavor if not down right delicious.

Commercially made fondants often taste like preservatives or have an odd metallic taste. That issue is completely solved by using home made fondant, which many professional bakers are doing now, too. Whether it's marshmallow fondant or a more traditional sugar and syrup fondant, the flavors are fresher and don't carry the flavor of plastic packaging, emulsifiers, or preservatives.

If you get too carried away with the food coloring, your fondant will start to taste like food dye but that can be countered by rolling the fondant very thin and slathering the cake with a lovely dark chocolate ganache, pureed raspberries (or other fruit) and sugar, preserves, cream cheese frosting, or tasty buttercream frosting before applying the fondant. You need some kind of adhesive to hold the fondant on anyway.

You can also make flavored fondant by adding flavoring oils to the fondant as you make it. I sometimes like to use almond, lemon, or mint flavoring in my fondant.

I made this cake for my partner's sister, mom, and niece. His sister and niece are big My Little Pony fans. This was probably the easiest cake to make because My Little Pony cartoons are completely two-dimensional. I just rolled out flat fondant and used an Exacto knife to cut out shapes.

The cake inside was marble cake with light chocolate frosting.

I made this cake for my partner's mom. I wasn't sure what design to put on her cake until I remembered that she has a number of lighthouse themed items in her home. So I made this lighthouse cake for her birthday.

Due to humidity, the cake picked up a bit of a glisten and the clouds and whitecaps I had painted on the sky and water ended up looking less distinct. While the moisture detracted a bit from the cake's appearance, the fondant blended with the frosting and softened quite a bit making it a better texture to eat.

You can find my fondant recipe and instructions on how to make it at How To Make Fondant For Cake Art along with tips on how to roll it out, prevent fondant from sticking (and how to rescue fondant when it does stick), and how to make make colored fondant and flavored fondant.

I made this cake for my partner who is an avid audiophile and musician. The guitar pick shaped symbol with the religious icons inside it is a creation of his. He made the design at a conference a few years ago. I put it on the cake along with fondant 45 spindles, guitar picks, musical notes, and guitars. I guess I just added the metallic gears because they looked cool on the black/silver marble fondant.

The cake was butterscotch flavored with caramel frosting.

OK, so this has got to be my worst cake so far. It's not a shape I would choose to make on my own but it was a special request. I could probably make a decent beer can cake in the future because I learned what not to do with this one.

I tried to make a half-cylinder baking pan out of aluminum foil but the cake just bulged out of the foil as it cooked. So I had to carve the resultant cake into a rough half-cylinder with a knife, coat it with buttercream frosting and hope for the best.

The resultant cake was still lumpy, as you can see. So I just sighed and did my best with it.

Painting calligraphy with frosting isn't as easy as I'd thought. I spent a long time at it and the results were pretty poor so I probably won't try it again without stencils.

However, I discovered gold luster dust, an edible gold colored dust which can be mixed with alcohol and painted onto fondant to create a metallic sheen.

The cake was double vanilla butter cake with vanilla bean frosting, so at least it was delicious if not so attractive.

I made this cake for a friend's baby shower. It is designed to co-ordinate with her Trendy Mommy invitations, napkins, plates and cups. I put a little spin on the placement of the little flowers to avoid having it look too stiff.

I've determined (from making this cake) that I'll only use fudge fondant on small cakes because it is not very flexible and it tends to tear if you so much as look at it funny. Rolling out and applying a section of fudge fondant this big was a major headache.

The cake inside was marbled white cake and dark chocolate cake. I'd never baked such a big cake before and I was afraid it would overcook on the edges but it turned out perfectly baked.