DIY Marshmallow Fondant

A couple weeks ago, my hubby celebrated his 27th birthday. Pretty amazing, considering he had just celebrated his 17th when we first met! Anywho, I made this scrumptious cake for him – and posted it on facebook – and got some friends asking how I did it on facebook, so here’s a tutorial! Well, not on the cake baking process. But on the homemade fondant!

So for this post, Makayla and I made Valentine’s cupcakes. We started out with these ingredients, plus a few others for the cupcakes. For the fondant all you need is Marshmallows, food coloring in color of your choice, and cookie cutter (or a small cup works if you want circles). You will also need some butter or margarine.

First we mixed up the batter and got the cupcakes baking. Of course she needed her cupcake shirt and cupcake hair clip for this. (Ya know, 3 year olds know how to get things done right!)

Ok for the fondant – I used about a cup and a half of marshmallows. It depends on how much you will need. I suggest trying it first and seeing how much it really makes – this batch I made for this post made over 15 small hearts (I threw out the rest since I didn’t need near that many)

Nuke your marshmallows in the microwave – I do it about 30 seconds on high power. They will then look something like this:

I have found a spatula works best for this part. Add your food coloring, and mix it in as best you can. If you want a darker, more vibrant color, add more food coloring now because you can’t do it very well later. You will be adding alot of white powerdered sugar, so this will lighten the color that you will see now.

Then take 1/2 cup of powered sugar and add it directly to the bowl. You can skip this and go to the next step, but it’s less messy to me if you do this first.

Once that’s done, get a large mixing bowl of some sort. Cover the bottom with powered sugar. I used about a a cup and a half here. Drop your mixture onto it.

Knead the mixture with your spatula until it becomes harder to do. You want to keep mixing the powered sugar into it.

If you prefer, you can use your hands for this. Or let your kids do it – it’s fun! This is where the butter comes in. Cover your hands with butter or margarine (we just used cold margarine and rubbed it like soap) before touching it. Because it will be a big. sticky. gooey. mess. You’ve been warned…

You’ll know it’s done when you can roll it out without it sticking to the rolling pin. If it sticks, add some more powdered sugar. If it’s not rolling out easily that means you added to much powdered sugar. Just melt some butter and knead it in there. It’s a really forgiving recipe.

Roll it out however thick you would like it to be. I made mine pretty thin – but it’s really your preference. (below photo is alot thicker than I actually made my hearts and circles) I recommend rolling it on wax paper, and putting your finished cutouts on wax paper.

You can store these for a couple of days before needing to use them. We had leftovers from the cake that were good a few days later.

Yumm!!

This is a fun (if you have kids) and easy way to make a cute cake (or cupcakes!) for under $5 instead of spending $30+ on a custom cake from a bakery. Let’s take another peek at that cake, shall we?

Don’t even get me started on how good this cake was. Let’s just say it’s a good thing actually dieting wasn’t a resolution this year, lol.