I was actually really surprised at how easy it was to do the fondant this time. I did a few little things differently this time, not exactly sure which thing made the biggest change. For starters I used a different brand of fondant this time. I was going to buy the Satin Ice fondant like I used last time, but my regular supplier was out of the Satin Ice and sent me Orchard brand fondant instead. I was pretty annoyed about this and worried about using the different brand, but the fondant was extremely pliable and soft, didn't get sticky and was very easy to smooth. With last months cake I had colored the fondant with gel food coloring, whereas this time I left it white, so I don't know what difference that made to the workability of the fondant (is workability a word?? Well it is now anyway!)
Last time, I used powdered sugar to stop the fondant from sticking, and then started using shortening when the fondant began cracking. This time however, I only used shortening and had some powdered sugar on standby in case the fondant got too sticky, which it didn't!
And I think the biggest difference was the weather! You may recall me saying that the weather when I was doing the Christmas cake was stinking hot, well I was extremely lucky this time around and the one day I was working with the fondant the weather dropped by like, 10 degrees!
So you can see that after I made two of the rose-style flowers I gave up and made some simple ruffled circle flowers to go with the cake. I got too frustrated with the rose style ones, and they took a lot of time (which I was very short of!) and patience (which I also lack lol!) to make, so I decided to start off testing my skill by doing the simpler flowers for the first couple of cakes before moving onto proper roses. Next time around I'll also color the gumpaste first rather than painting the final product and use luster powder to add dimension.
You can see that the fondant still isn't perfectly smooth, but I'm definitely getting better at it! Practice makes perfect right?
And it was way easy to put the ribbon border on, the hardest thing was lining it up properly so the bottom of the cake was entirely hidden. I don't think you can really see it in the photos but there are a couple of spots where about 3-4mm of cake are visible at the bottom of the border.
I would definitely make sure that next time I make the cake on a cake board, I didn't use one this time because I didn't think it would be necessary, but moving the cake around was a real pain in the butt. I couldn't make the cake on the cake stand because the cake stand wouldn't fit in my fridge so used a regular plate, but it was difficult to cover the cake in fondant on the plate because of the edges!
I have a really handy pizza lifter that I use for lifting and moving my cake layers, but I still had a bit of trouble moving it at the end, so I might buy some of those cheap bulk cake boards off eBay for next time.
So, I'm really, really happy with how the cake turned out and I'm now starting to think about next months cake - maybe a Valentines Day themed cake?? :)
Oh btw, Happy Birthday to my wonderful dear husband, who without a doubt, is the best thing to have ever happened to me - especially since he's given me two beautiful, happy boys!!! I love my family :)
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