Here’s my very first fondant icing cake! Fondant icing and I don’t exactly get along. It’s not really my world and in the few years I’ve been baking, I’ve never felt the urge to cover a cake with fondant icing. I’m very “traditional pastry” and in all honesty, I don’t really understand why cake design is so popular. And then, I have to say I find it very hard to believe that you can make something that tastes as good as it looks…
But there you go… my niece is about to turn 3 and my sister asked me to make her a pretty Hello Kitty cake! I would do anything to please my niece, including working with fondant icing 😛 So I borrowed all the necessary utensils from my blogger friend Séverine (Délices et Pâtisserie) because I have absolutely nothing! A big thank you!
My niece will be 3 in a few days but I still wanted to do a test run beforehand. You never know, I prefer to anticipate any difficulties I might run into! So I took advantage of an afternoon with my niece to make a yogurt cake with her. Then I took care of the decoration on my own.
On the whole, I’m fairly happy with the result for a first attempt. It’s obviously full of imperfections, which you can see mainly up close, but it allowed me to see what working with fondant icing is like. It’s quite pleasant, although a bit long, especially when you’re a beginner like me. I ended up bringing it to a special “Baby shower” tea party the next day and everyone was blown away.
As for the taste… it’s a yogurt cake so nothing exceptional. The guests liked it, I found it a little too dry for my taste. That’s why I added the step of soaking the cake to make it more moist.
Ingredients & preparation
3 components · Full recipe
Yogurt Cake
Ingredients
- 3 eggs
- 1 pot of yogurt
- 3 pots of plain flour
- 2 pots of sugar
- 1/2 pot of sunflower oil
- 1 sachet of baking powder
- 1 sachet of vanilla sugar
- chocolate chips
Preparation
1
Preheat the oven to 180°C / 350°F.
2
Pour the yogurt into a bowl and add, in order: the sugars, the eggs one by one, the flour, baking powder, salt and oil. Mix well with a whisk.
3
Add the chocolate chips.
4
Pour the batter into a buttered tin or silicone mould and bake for approximately 30 minutes. Test with a knife — it should come out clean.
5
As soon as it comes out of the oven, soak the cake with the cold syrup using a pastry brush. Don’t over-soak it or it may crumble during assembly. Leave to cool.
Soaking Syrup
Ingredients
- 25 g (0.9 oz) sugar
- 60 ml (2 fl oz) water
- 1 tablespoon rum
- 1 vanilla pod
Preparation
1
Bring the water, sugar and scraped vanilla pod to the boil until the sugar is completely dissolved.
2
Off the heat, add the rum (you can add it before if you want it to evaporate during cooking… useful if serving to children, for example).
3
Strain the syrup through a fine sieve and leave to cool.
Assembly and Decoration
Ingredients
- chocolate spread (e.g. Nutella)
- pink, white and yellow fondant icing
- a black food colouring pen
Preparation
1
Once the cake is completely cold, slice it in half horizontally using a serrated knife or a cake wire.
2
Place the first disc on a serving plate.
3
Spread generously with Nutella, then place the second disc on top. Smooth the edges, then cover the entire cake with a layer of Nutella (to help the fondant icing adhere).
4
Decorate the cake as you like. I used fondant icing in several colours to recreate Hello Kitty 🙂
Gallery
