Let's face it...fondant covered cakes are cool! It adds a flawless iced finished, you can cover just about anything in it, mold, sculpt, and cut things out of it and best of all, YOU CAN EAT IT...or can you? When we did our first cake the source of most of our anxiety was working with the fondant. You couldn't get a clear opinion, some said it was simple to work with others declared it somewhat difficult. We found that the level of working with it fell somewhere in the middle. However after all the stress of rolling it, and keeping it from sticking to just about anything it touched, and then finally getting it onto the cake, that the biggest let down came down to eating it. All the hard work (and yes it's work, screw the Shake Weight, if you want awesome arms roll out fondant for 10 minutes) and decorating, seemed a bit of a waste once we actually tasted the fondant. To say the least it was GROSS! So gross that even our kids wouldn't eat it.
Fondant tastes like pure sugar, with the texture and after taste of dough. After the disappointment, I did some research and found that some people claimed that by adding vanilla, lemon, orange, or cherry flavoring, the fondant would be more palatable...but this was not the case. After further research I found that while fondant CAN be eaten, it's really not intended to be. It acts as more of a rind for the cake, helping to lock in moisture and provide stability. Proper etiquette says that in most cases when served a piece of cake covered in fondant, at lets say....a wedding for example, you would simply peel away the fondant shell encasing the piece and only eat the cake.
I was dumb founded by this! Do you know what people pay for wedding cakes...even moderately decorated ones these days...ALOT! In most cases a 3 tier cake iced with regular icing can run $300 or more...add fondant into the equation and you could be paying as much for a wedding CAKE as you would a wedding DRESS. That's a lot of money when you can't even eat an important part of the cake...the icing.
Wicked Creations Cakes uses a different kind of fondant. If your not concerned about eating the cake you're making, then you can stop reading now and go by some pre made fondant that will look beautiful but taste awful. Our fondant is a marshmallow base that is yummy to eat even before you get it on the cake and when it adheres to the butter cream layer of the cake it is just as good...even better. So don't go spending an obscene amount of money on a really gorgeous cake if you're not going to be able to enjoy every part of it.
