Fondant Icing

For the first time I tried to use fondant icing to decorate a cake for my friend's birthday, after seeing it used so frequently on the cooking shows I watch so earnestly. The design itself came from a videogame series that my friend is a big fan of and features a logo that's heavily used in the games.

In the past I had looked at making fondant icing before but I was completely put off by the extensive list of ingredients that some recipes called for, but I managed to find one that was actually really simple:

Fondant Icing
1 Egg White
450g Icing Sugar
50g Liquid Glucose [I found this in Morrisons, it's vital]
Flavouring + Colouring

1) Sift Icing Sugar into a bowl.
2) Add glucose, egg white and any colourings/flavourings into a well in the centre.
3) Beat to a stiff paste
4) Turn into a board [sprinkled with icing sugar] and knead to a doughy consistency.

You'll have to make sure that you keep the board sugared (I doubt that's even a word...) because fondant, as I found, likes to stick to anything and everything it can (including hands).
When you're finished kneading the dough you can wrap it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge or even freeze it, both are good ways to store it but you must remember to cover it in clingfilm because if any air can get to it then it will set and you won't be able to use it.

Fondant's relatively easy to use, the hardest part for me was having enough ingredients to make the amount of fondant that I needed for my cake but just as long as you work carefully and confidently you should have no problems using it- it's a lot like playdough!

Sidenotes:
1) If you're covering a cake with fondant icing, you'll need to ice the cake with something so that the fondant can 'stick' to the cake. I used a cream cheese frosting but I'd completely recommend buttercream, it's far more stable, or you could even use marzipan- the choice is yours!

2) If you're wanting to put fondant on fondant (to make a design or cover a mistake, perhaps) then the best thing I found was to cut out the pieces needed and, using a brush, use water as a kind of glue to stick the pieces together.

A Slice Of Honest Pie

If any of my readers are still alive, it may be worth noting that my blog has undergone a name change. I felt that, after a year of not posting, picking back up where I left off after so much has happened without any changes at all would be a very awkward thing to do.

Henceforth, 'Two oranges and a banana' has been renamed 'A Slice Of Honest Pie' (naming and blog header are credited to Rachel and her creative genius, evening boredom and photoshop trial) in order to better reflect what I want this blog to be about:

1) Cooking - That's a given though, it is a cooking blog.

2) The truth about cooking - How many times have people followed a recipe to the very letter of a textbook and still managed to mess it up? I know it's happened to me more times than I can remember, so my goal is to give you my real life experiences with cooking and to tell you what actually happens, what really works and what's necessary as opposed to what gives it a different taste.

So having a slice of honest pie, as opposed to a slice of humble pie, is very apt for this blog and I hope that through my experiences that anyone that reads this blog can benefit and learn... or at least have fun reading!