My First Fondant Cake

I've always had this great ambition to make amazing birthday cakes for my kids, but frankly I'm not very good at making the frosting smooth. I usually end up just buying figurines and putting them on top of a regular cake. I've seen lots of cute fondant cake ideas and wished I knew how to that.

My cousin found a recipe for homemade marshmallow fondant for me and since my little man turned 1 this past weekend, well, I decided to try it. And after ruining my first batch, and then employing the aid of my husband, the second try worked. I am so excited how it turned out.

So do you want the recipe? Here it is with all the tweaks we made:

Marshmallow Fondant

8 oz mini marshmallows (4 cups not packed)

4 c powdered sugar, plus a little for dusting

2 T water

Food coloring and flavoring, optional

Put marshmallows and water in a large microwave safe bowl. Microwave for 1 minute and stir until smooth. If you are adding flavoring, stir it in now. Also if you are only doing ONE color, add it now too. If you're doing more than one color, wait. Add the powdered sugar and stir until it becomes too difficult to stir. Dust your counter with powdered sugar and dump the mixture out. Knead with your hands until all the powdered sugar is incorporated and it is smooth. If your doing more than one color, split your fondant and hand knead the coloring in. It is now ready to use. If you're not using it right away, wrap in plastic. You can store it in the fridge also. If the fondant gets a little stiff, microwave for 5-10 seconds to soften it up again.

Note: If you don't want to have to knead the coloring into the fondant, split the recipe up before you make it so you are doing several partial recipes and dye each section before you add the sugar.

Now to use your fondant:

Spray your work space and rolling pin with cooking spray. Yes I know it sound weird, but trust me you want to. This is where I messed up my first batch. Roll out fondant to desired thickness. To transfer to your cake, roll the fondant up around the rolling pin and lay over the cake. Use your hands to smooth out.

To add the shapes to my cake I rolled out the fondant, or rather my husband did, and we used regular old cookie cutters! For the border around the bottom we made two long snakes out of the two colors and twisted them together.

Isn't it AMAZING!!!!!