Venturing into Fondant Decorating

For the number of years I've been baking (although I'm still nowhere expert), I've never dressed a cake before. In the recent 2 years, fondant cake decorating has become more and more popular and these cakes don't come cheap. I though instead of buying one, it'll be better if I take a short course on it and decorate the cake myself but I can just never seem to find time for it.

As my mom and sister's birthday are drawing near, I thought it will be nice to bake them a nicely decorated cake. So, I googled up and search tutorial videos in YouTube (thank god for technology) on decorating a cake with fondant. Kept watching videos over videos for numerous times until I feel I'm confident to start a project on my own.

While the videos look easy, but when it comes to the actual work, boy it's not as easy as it seems.

For such a simple decoration, and for a novice like me, it took close to 2 hours for me to complete it.

Last week, I did another round of baking & decorating a birthday cake and this time it was for my mother-in-law. The process was somewhat quicker I guess but I did the baking and decorating on the same day. The whole process was about 6 hours - two rounds of cake baking in a small electric oven, cooling the cake, crumb coating, and decorate. Now I know why these cakes cost a bomb - especially with the amount of work to decorate. A friend told me "You'll won't appreciate a decorated cake till you've decorated one yourself." And she was so true!!

So this is my 2nd fondant decorated cake project.

The next project will be in another few months time I guess, and hopefully I will have time to decorate a cake for K-girl's 1st birthday. :)