I know this question has been asked about a bazillion times before, but I never paid attention to the answers, of course, and now I want to know . What are the different uses for fondant vs gumpaste? When do you use one or the other? Why?
Thanks!

Becca

Fondant can be used for covering cakes. You also use it as a base for tylose, gumtex and even gumpaste. You would do this if you wanted to make it more pliable and sturdy for molding. This also makes it dry harder. For flowers, you use a higher ratio of the gumtex to fondant, or even pure gumpaste. This allows you to do some really neat things with flowers. It allows you to thin and furl the petals while allowing them to keep their shape. If you use just fondant, the petals kind of sag back after you try to shape them. The downside of gumpaste or fondant/gumtex mixtures is that they can get hard and dry really, really fast. So, you have to keep things covered(like your rose petals), until you are ready to add them to your project.

That's just my novice experience with fondant vs gumpaste!!!

Hi Becca,
Fondant is made out of powdered sugar, glucose (to help against humidity), gelatin (to give it flexibility-like plastic) and most important it has Glycerin ( so that it doesn't get hard) so that it can be cut with a knife when it covers a cake. So mostly fondant is used to cover cakes and to make decorations for the cake that you don't want to dry hard. If it didn't have glycerin you would have to use a hammer to cut the cake
Gumpaste is also made out of powdered sugar, glucose, and it uses Tylose (an eatable aglutinant (like a glue), but it doesn't have glycerin because you want it to get dry and hard. So gumpaste is used for making flowers, little animals, people, cake tops....etc. whatever you want to make but you want it to dry hard so that it stays in place. Hope that helps Taty

Thank you so much! That does help a lot.

Becca