What goes into creating toppers made from fondant? What time, materials, tools and other resources does one need?
For toppers where one has a mould, or can order one locally, it doesn't take long to push the correctly coloured fondant (with hardener) into a mould an pop out the 3D or 2D shape. Moulds requiring different colours for different parts are more tricky to do. All is easy for well-made moulds. When the mould isn't good, one has to touch up the fondant shape. The fondant must then dry.
For hand made toppers, it is not so quick. To start with, one must colour pieces of fondant as needed. For the design, one can do your own based on experience and creativity. There are step by step instructions for modelling available on You
be for example. Some figures can be made partially from a mould (face mould or bodice mould if available).
In terms of tools there are different tools one can invest in for cutting and shaping, as well as a cutting mat. A drier to speed up the drying process can be useful.
People have indicated to me that fondant figures can be expensive. Like other baking art, one of the biggest costs is time. For someone who hasn't tried to make a fondant figure before, the time for a YouTube video is not an indicator of the time it takes to make the model. The videos are normally edited and played fastee than real time. Some steps are completely missing in the video (for example colouring the fondant to the colour needed).
I would like to give you an example to illustrate the time involved in making a fondant topper or model. I am working on a Paw patrol figure from a video. At 2 minutes 37 seconds into the video, I had used at least an hour to get to the same point (excluding time to colour the fondant). Here is a photo of what I had made at this point.
I hope that this article has opened your eyes to a little of what goes on in the kitchen in the making of a fondant model.
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