Chef Sandie Bakes: My first fondant cake and the learning curve that comes with it.

I haven't made a cake in months and I've been dying to get into a kitchen and try again. This has ended up as my last attempt at making the Martha Stewart White Wedding Cake. I can't get the cake right (or maybe it is right and it just sucks). I also attempted the Raspberry Buttercream and, for the first time ever, trying to make a fondant. So here we go...

First, I made the cake but took no pics of the process as it's pretty standard. As it is in the oven, I start to make the raspberry puree for the buttercream. I actually used mix berries and not just raspberries. Then I cooked them with sugar for a bit, put them in a blender to mix them up and then through a seive so that I just get the liquid. Tada!

The puree is put aside to cool down and I focus on making the buttercream. It mainly consists of egg whites, sugar and butter. What you don't see is the making of the meringue. I put the egg whites and sugar together in a metal bowl over a saucepan of boiling water. I wish the egg whites and the sugar together over the heat until the sugar is completely dissolved in the egg whites. I then put it in the mixer and whisk it non-stop until there are soft peaks (I think I should have whipped it longer but I was too impatient. Soft peaks:

Once you reach the peaks, you slowly add butter to the meringue and it turns into a buttercream. This is how much butter the recipe calls for:

Once it becomes the buttercream, the puree is added and it takes on a nice pink hue:

Then my cake came out and I cut it up, layered it and did an initial coat of icing to lock in the crumbs:

After it was cooled down, a final layer of cream was spread over the entire cake. I didn't think I needed to make the sides/edge perfect as I thought the fondant would fix it. It does not, as I later found out.

As I waited for the cake to cool in the fridge, I decide to making a chocolate frosting, which is made of cocoa powder, icing sugar and butter. Mmmmmmmm...

So now the assembly starts. I made a fondant with corn syrup and icing sugar and it didn't work well. After rolling it out, I put it on the cake and look what happened!

So the next morning I tried to make fondant again but used a different recipe - Marshmallow fondant. It was easy, see...

This is when it got tricky. I managed to trim it down but I did not know how to remove the creases from when you fold it in. Need to learn. Also, notice how you can tell the icing underneath was not flat. New lesson - I now know that fondant cannot hide imperfect icing, it hugs it too much.