Sea of Tie-Dye

Lauren and I have been very remiss in our posting of late. I blame everything on work. Really I'm not to be one of those people who work but alas life, and my increasing addiction to on-line shopping, demand that I do so to maintain my life style.

I recently went back to my parent's for a yearly family party, VanStock. With tie-dyed decorations, flags, and clothing as far as the eye could see, my mom and I thought it would be fun to make a tie-dyed cake for the occasion. I'd been wanting to experiment with my own fondant for sometime and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

Using a recipe from Allrecipes.com I made a buttercream fondant:

1 cup light corn syrup
1 cup (white) shortening
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon clear vanilla extract
3 teaspoons lemon extract
2 pounds confectioners' sugar

I let it firm up in the fridge for about an hour then separated the mixture into balls and kneaded in color.



Now if you're going to try this you'll need at least another 1/2 pound powdered sugar. The fondant was very sticky and greasy and did not hold together well at all. The kneading was a pain and took forever but after I had the individually colored balls I smooshed (technical term) them together, did a little more kneading, and plopped it down on a powdered sugar covered surface. Rolling out the fondant further mixed up the colors so you really don't want to knead too much before the rolling. A could tips for this stage:

Tip 1: Make sure your surface, hands, and rolling pin are well covered in powdered sugar. Greasy though the fondant was it stuck to everything.

Tip 2: To get maximum color mix, roll out the fondant once then fold it in on itself and roll again.

The lemon extract in the fondant did not come through as much as I'd hoped leaving it to taste something like really intense marshmallows. Sigh. Better luck next time.



In the end I had a pretty hard time transferring the fondant to the cake. It wasn't very pliant and the slightest fold or bend made a section break off so there was a lot of swearing. I firmly maintain that vituprious swearing in the direction of the misbehaving object will make it behave. Or at least make me feel slightly better. Finally got the fondant on the cake and used remaining fondant to cut out 'Vanstock' to complete the decoration. Unfortunately I neglected to take a picture of that but it still looked semi decent without it.