Fondant 101: Kneading

Hi everyone, I'm Rachel Teufel, and I wanna share a handful of tips and tricks with you working with fondant. Fondant is one of those things that can be really tricky, but if you follow a few easy steps, I promise, it will be much easier for you to use and you'll make gorgeous cakes. So the first thing with fondant is that when it comes in its package, it's pretty firm, it's almost rock-hard and it comes packaged in just a little bag of some sort to keep it from drying out. And you can tell even just pushing on it, this is really hard. So my recommendation is to knead it first. You really need to get this moving before you're gonna be able to roll it onto your cake. So just start by cutting off a small piece. You wanna keep it manageable, you don't wanna work with too much at one time. And always just twist up your bag so that it stays airtight for you. And then break this into a couple of pieces. Now you can see it's really firm, I'm putting a lot of pressure on here, so I wouldn't be able to roll this out really smoothly if I didn't knead it first. So I like to just get some small pieces and then squash it up a little bit. And you're gonna use the heel of your hand and push straight down on the fondant and then roll it back on itself and push again. And then I'm just gonna set that aside for a moment and squeeze the next one. You definitely get your arm workout when working with fondant. Again, just squash, rotate it a little bit, push your palm back down again. And then I just start a nice little pile, push, turn and squash again, very technical terms here. Okay, and then when you have a few pieces, what you wanna do is actually just kind of put it in a little bit of a log and you're gonna do that same process of kneading. So you're gonna bring your palm, and fold it back on itself, and then just push. And you just wanna continue to do this. And this is just a way of sort of warming up your fondant and getting it ready for what it's going to do in the next steps, which is usually rolling it out and covering your cake with fondant. But you can't skip this process. Okay, so now our fondant looks nice and smooth, it's pliable, you can squish it and move it and do whatever you need to do with it, is a very different contrast to what you see coming straight out of the bucket of fondant. So that's how you knead your fondant, and now this would be ready to go for rolling out and placing on your cake.