Fondant icing help please!

[marjolaine]

I'm being ambitious and baking a Gruffalo cake for DC1's birthday. I've found a tutorial online and had a practice go using some regular white fondant I got from Tesco (turned out alright surprisingly!) but obviously need it to be brown. I can buy some brown fondant online but am concerned it will taste like crap. So, I've found a chocolate marshmallow fondant recipe but don't know anything about fondant at all-- will that harden well and hold the shapes or be too soft?

(in case it matters, this is the tutorial and this is the recipe)

Dark brown fondant tends to be chocolate flavour, light brown is toffee. Quite tasty actually . Fwiw, I did gruffalo cake for dd2 birthday and it was buttercream. Don't usually use it but it worked very well esp for the fur effect.

Majolaine, if your going to make shapes you need a stronger fondant, like the modeling sugarpaste you can get from your cake decoraters shop, which is whit and just colour it brown, i'm in the middle of making a fondant girl(pic is on my profile pics) ordinary fondant is too soft, it does however hold its shapes until bits break off, which you dont want. or do as Molehill said and make it with buttercream.

Love the cake on that tutorial Majolaine, would love to make that for my grandson. She makes that look quiet easy to do, very good tutorial!

Thanks for the help. I'll just buy brown fondant then. I hadn't considered buttercream but maybe if I make the cake a gruffalo itself rather than having them all on the top?

Your cakes are lovely, nannycook. And the tutorial is very easy, my practice go looked pretty good and I used no tools and did it sitting on the floor with DC2 on the playmat!

Some dark brown fondants are not chocolate flavour, and won't taste very nice, so make sure you get one that mentions chocolate. You can turn normal fondant into modelling paste by adding tylose powder.

The one I used was a Jane Asher comic relief gruffalo minus the red nose. Just wasn't in a fondant mood that day and also quite wanted to see dd2 dig her hands into the cake!