Rolled fon­dant is one of those things that sep­a­rates your typ­ical home cook/baker from both the pro­fes­sional baker/confectioner (the kind of person I’ll pay to make my wed­ding cake) and the emo­tion­ally unbal­anced artists you see cre­ating 6ft tall, sugar-coated edi­fices on the Food Net­work. It turns a simple dessert into some­thing that is both food and art – at once ele­vating the aes­thetic and sac­ri­ficing some of the gas­tro­nomic quality. It’s what makes people say “ooooooo!”.

It’s that last reac­tion I was most inter­ested in. Sure, the adven­ture of it was an attrac­tion. I’m con­stantly on the lookout for the next culi­nary chal­lenge, and rolled fon­dant is nothing if not a chal­lenge. But, in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day, what I wanted most was to create some­thing for my fiancee that would elicit a little bit of awe – that look that says “I can’t believe you did that!”

Curi­ously, Chi­nese New Year and Valentine’s Day coin­cide this year. There­fore my cre­ation would be most suc­cessful if I were able to marry the two themes into one great looking cake. I went to the Oracle seeking inspi­ra­tion and the oracle did not disappoint.

Cake

Yellow cake is the vanilla ice cream of cake. Plain, generic, but filled with poten­tial. It can be paired with many things. It’s a good foun­da­tion. Best Recipe has a yellow cake recipe that is decent. It requires a sig­nif­i­cant quan­tity of butter and eggs, so the recipe is expen­sive and not entirely healthy (no matter what Bill Cosby might say). Because my fiancee is not a fan of really sweet desserts, I cut back on the sugar and used rum instead of vanilla for flavoring.

Filling

For the Chi­nese New Year aspect, I wanted to find a filling for the cake that would evoke a typ­ical chi­nese dessert. Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I wanted some­thing red. I set­tled on sweet red bean paste. This is some­thing I’ve had before in things like steamed buns and other dim sum-style desserts. It was a good flavor match with the subtle yellow cake and reminded me of some­thing I might have at an upscale Chi­nese restaurant.

Red bean paste is made very simply. Dried azuki beans (small and red, looking like a cross between a mini kidney bean and a black-eyed pea) are boiled in water until soft. Sugar and a little salt is added. Cooking con­tinues until the paste has absorbed the sugar. For a smooth paste, the mix­ture can be pureed and the bean skins removed by straining. I pre­ferred an unprocessed, chunky paste for tex­ture. To fill my cake, I mixed a bit of the chunky paste with heavy cream and cov­ered the top of the first cake layer with a thick coating. I then placed the second layer on top of the paste and pressed firmly to make sure the paste would hold the two layers together.

Fon­dant

A couple of web­sites rec­om­mended making rolled fon­dant out of marsh­mel­lows. According to these sites, this cre­ates a fon­dant that is much tastier than a tra­di­tional, pur­chased fon­dant. While this is a good thing, the marshmellow-based fon­dant suf­fers from two draw­backs: first, it’s very very sticky, making it dif­fi­cult to work with. Second, it’s basi­cally a com­bi­na­tion of pow­dered sugar (1.5 to 2 pounds!) and marsh­mel­lows, making it extremely sweet. This can com­pletely over­whelm the fla­vors of a subtle cake (like the red bean cake I made).

Making rolled fon­dant is like making a lean dough. In this case, the flour is replaced with pow­dered sugar. Playing the role of the yeast/water mix­ture is a warm mix of water and melted mini-marshmellows. A sig­nif­i­cant amount of pow­dered sugar is added to the melted marsh­mellow and the mix­ture is kneaded until it stiffens into an elastic ball that can be rolled out. The ini­tial mix­ture is a bit like wet rubber cement. It gets on your hands and is impos­sible to remove. You just have to keep trying to incor­po­rate more pow­dered sugar. Even­tu­ally, it begins to firm up and you can shape it into a ball that can be kneaded like a dough. While kneading, you can add food col­oring. I added red color and did not fully incor­po­rate it. The result was a mar­bled pink and white sur­face for my cake that was very attractive.

Con­struc­tion

My lay­ered cake was cut into a simple heart shape. I made but­ter­cream icing (search for “Cake” in this blog to find my icing recipe) and coated the cake to create a sticky sur­face for the fon­dant. I’m not sure this step is com­pletely nec­es­sary. That, or per­haps I used too much. A small amount of icing would prob­ably have worked. The rolled fon­dant, maybe 1/8 inch thick, was very heavy and easily stayed in place when spread out over the cake. The ben­efit of the icing is that is smoothed out the rough cor­ners of my shaped cake and enhanced the heart shape. Trim­ming the fon­dant to the bottom edge of the cake was a chal­lenge. This is likely due to the shape. If I had made a per­fectly round or square cake, this would have been easier. How­ever, once the fon­dant was spread over the cake, it was flex­ible enough to smooth it over the iced sur­face and create the pro­fes­sional look I was hoping for.

Result

The cake was a suc­cess. My adven­ture was a mixed bag. The fon­dant recipe is exces­sive. I may have dis­carded more fon­dant than I used, and I didn’t even make a full recipe. It was more like a 2/3 or 3/4 recipe. And while it did ele­vate the cake from a simple desert to some­thing spe­cial, fon­dant totally throws off the flavor bal­ance. I don’t usu­ally favor appear­ance over flavor. While it was okay for this occa­sion, I wouldn’t nor­mally make that choice.

The red bean mix­ture was simple and effec­tive. I liked it plain, and it was very tasty when mixed with the heavy cream. Azuki beans are easily pur­chased near my home as I live in close prox­imity to many Chi­nese markets.

I’m very glad to have expe­ri­enced cake-making with rolled fon­dant. I was a time– and resource-consuming adven­ture, but and expe­ri­ence that is worth­while. I feel like a I took a step for­ward with con­fec­tionery, even if it was a step in a direc­tion I’m not likely to follow.