Fondant is like play dough and made from a variety of edible ingredients such as sugar, water, corn syrup and the recipe I chose called for "Walmart" marshmallows. Making it was a bit of a struggle. I don't own nor do I want to own a microwave and so I balanced a large stainless steel bowl over my soup pan to melt the marshmallows and since I didn't have any idea what fondant was suppose to look and feel like, I just compared it to what it looked like on a YouTube video. Also, I have never taken any classes on modeling clay so each bodily appendage took a lot of work and hundreds of tries to get it "almost"right.
I used the Artisan Cake Company videos and followed the step by step directions. I would watch a bit and then stop the video and try to do what I was seeing on the video. t took me weeks and several batches of fondant, each batch coming out a little better then the previous one. I would give up and search for fondant to buy but they tasted so bad that I would go back to the video and try again. I made a total of 3 completed pregnant ladies and probably 5 creepy failures plus various body parts before I finally had one completed that didn't break or look too creepy.
I spent hours on Craftsy watching all those online classes about melt in your mouth buttercream frosting, sugar flowers that look so real, and a variety of other videos showing how to make fondant critters. In every online class there was a gadget that I didn't have and knew I couldn't live without. I bought cake decorating tools, kits, and a few molds. If a video said I needed something I put it on my list to buy. I roamed the hardware stores and craft stores looking for bench scrapers and a variety of interesting things that I could use to create patterns on the fondant.
Cakes were made and frozen and after 12 pounds of butter and a trillion egg
whites, I finally perfected the Italian butter cream which I intended to use on the cake before covering it all up with fondant.
Soon came another baby shower and I decided to make a Thumbelina cake topper. After that I was ready for a real challenge--my daughter's birthday was coming and so I decided I would surprise her by making a sugar shoe, a red stiletto and the cake would be the shoe box. Course, that meant I needed more tools and molds for those perfect heels. Then I turned to Craftsy again and slowly after weeks of practicing I created a perfect stiletto, the shoe box cake, and a fondant cake board.
All the while a short story churned around in my mind. Maybe that is the secret to writing-- having a creative pursuit not related to writing.