Fondant - yuck or yum?

Chocolate Fondant - YUM!

All photos shown here involve working with the chocolate fondant, not the store bought fondant.

I have never been a fan of fondant on cakes. I find the taste and texture rather unappealing, bland and 'gummy'. Apparently, I just haven't tasted good fondant or flavored fondant.

I worked with fondant for the first time about a month ago. I bought the fondant for a cake decorating class I took at a local craft store. The fondant met my expectations in that it had a weird texture like that of a really old thick piece of chewing gum. It had no flavor and didn't taste that much better with raspberry flavoring added to it. However, my instructor assured me that fondant does taste good if you find the right recipe and recognize that it will never have the texture of butter cream or whipped icing.



She was right! I found an excellent chocolate fondant recipe in The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum on page 309. The recipe called for gelatin, water, corn syrup, glycerin, vegetable shortening, vanilla, powdered sugar and unsweetened cocoa.



I used Hershey's Special Dark cocoa and the flavor was intense, but delicious. If you like chocolate and cocoa, you'll like this recipe. The texture reminded me of chewy candy, not as dense as fudge, but still quite tasty.


Side Note: the fondant worked well to cover a cake, but was not elastic enough to make fondant decorations like a bow or flowers. You will need to add gum text, gum paste or something to increase it's elasticity if you want to use it to decorate a cake. Also, I ended up using my stand mixer to knead it towards the end and had to add some water to obtain the correct texture.