fondant: the limitless 'icing'

For my 26th birthday, my friends surprised me with a wonderful activity - cupcake decorating and learning how to make and use fondant! It was probably one of the best birthdays I have ever had. I really loved how they picked something that they knew makes me happy and went to all the work and fuss to prepare for it! I seriously have the best friends in the world :)

Fondant is a very sweet, modelling clay like icing. Virtually it makes cake decorating designs limitless. Egg whites, liquid glucose and icing sugar.

None of us had ever used fondant before so we long debated the correct consistency - it's quite thick and hard to mix.

Next we coloured the fondant with this teal colour. we decided not to make it even since all three of us loved the swirling effect. They bought me all the colours of food colouring :-) So now with fondant expertise and all the colours of the rainbow and more, I will be experimenting with all sorts of designs. Perhaps I'll get good enough to have a little side business of cupcake making! A rolling pin was left in another city, but thankfully A. found the perfect substitute - a tall glass with an udderly cute cow on it :-)

So much easier to "ice". We put the fondant on the cupcake top and the cut around it.

Next, we used tiny cookie cutters to cut stars from another batter of yellow swirled fondant. We thought we'd have a simple success for the first time rather than trying something really daring.

It was getting late, so we decided to just ice the the other cupcakes. Note the beautiful colours!!! How exciting is that! Also, note the perfect cupcake/cake storer thing! No more painfully slow rides from my house to Bible study with the driver verbally warning the cake holder as we approach stop signs and turns.

We can't have a cake decorating event without some sort of flop story. We mixed the remaining yellow and pink icing together to ice the last cupcake. Big mistake. Turned this really ugly "old lady pink" colour. Dreadful. Believe me, there was no fight over THAT cupcake. In fact, we all quickly agreed that we would not keep the remaining old lady pink icing. But alas, A. decided at the very last minute that C.'s garbage pail should be old lady pink. And perhaps the floor colour should be changed too :P

And now... for the final product.....