All about Fondant Icing & Decorations (2024)

What is Fondant?

Fondant is an edible icing with a pliable texture that can be rolled, shaped and sculpted. It’s most commonly used to decorate cakes, cupcakes and cookies.

There are different types of fondant, including rolled fondant, pour fondant, chocolate fondant, sculpting fondant, marshmallow fondant and gumpaste fondant. Marshmallow fondant is by far the easiest fondant recipe to make at home and requires only three ingredients — marshmallows, water and powdered sugar!

And if you’ve heard the rumors that fondant doesn’t taste good, no need to worry about that here! I have to keep my kids out of the kitchen when I’m working with this marshmallow fondant recipe because they just want to keep stealing pieces to gobble up!

How to Make 3-Ingredient Marshmallow Fondant

The first time I made this recipe was for my oldest daughter’s 12th birthday. She wanted a rock-and-roll-themed cake, and I knew it would look SO much better with fondant decorations than with piped buttercream. I was able to use marshmallow fondant cutouts to spell her name in a perfect rocker-style font and to adorn the rest of the cake with mini lightning bolts. She loved it!

For this easy fondant recipe that’ll give you about 2-1/4 pounds of fondant, you’ll need to mix 1/4 cup water with 16 ounces of mini marshmallows. Then melt the mixture in the microwave using 30-second intervals, stirring between each interval.

Once the marshmallows have a smooth texture without any lumps, mix in 32 ounces of powdered sugar, a little at a time. Stir the mixture first with a spatula, then knead it by hand (or use a stand mixer and dough hook) to fully combine the marshmallows and sugar.

A thin coating of shortening on your hands will make the hand-kneading process MUCH easier. Once the mixture becomes a smooth ball of dough, it’s ready to use! You can roll it out immediately or color it before rolling.

How to Color Fondant

Fondant takes color well and can be turned all sorts of beautiful shades! It’s important to use gel coloring with fondant because liquid food coloring will change the fondant’s texture.

You can create multiple colors from one batch of fondant by separating sections for each different color. You might need only a little bit of one color and a lot of another, so divide the fondant accordingly.

Knead a couple of drops of gel coloring into the fondant by hand. Add more drops as needed to deepen the color. To prevent the color from staining your hands, coat them with vegetable shortening first or use disposable food gloves. If you use gloves, they will also need to be coated in shortening to prevent the fondant from sticking to the gloves.

How to Roll Out Fondant

Use a hard, flat surface to roll out your fondant. Fondant will pick up any little thing, so make sure the surface is extra clean before start. Prep the surface by giving it a light dusting of cornstarch or powdered sugar.

It’s easiest to work with small amounts of fondant at a time instead of the entire batch (unless you’re rolling out enough fondant to cover a large surface like a cake).

Press down on the fondant ball to start flattening it, then use a fondant rolling pin to roll it out evenly. Fondant rolling pins sometimes come with rubber bands that you can place on either side to help regulate the thickness. For fondant toppers and decorations, 1/8-inch thickness is a good general rule of thumb.

How to Use Fondant

There are some situations where decorating with fondant is ideal versus using other types of icing. Fondant is much more versatile than other icings for making three-dimensional shapes and pieces with a marbled look. You can also paint fondant and write on it with edible ink markers.

Fondant makes it much easier to personalize a design with letters and numbers. You can use cutters to achieve perfect, uniform shapes instead of relying on a steady piping hand.

Also, fondant won’t easily melt in the heat like regular frosting can. Best of all, it travels well because of its sturdy structure. That means there’s less chance of accidental smudges and smears!