hey everyone

so i'm in the middle of making a pirate ship cake for a birthday party. i decided to use michele foster's fondant recipe because i hear great things about it. everything was going perfect until i started adding icing sugar cup by cup to the mixing bowl with my mixer & dough hook. i read in the instructions to add icing sugar until the fondant stuck to the dough hook.. unfortunately, this never happened & my mixer suddenly stopped, made a funny noise, and then started smoking.. and it STINKS! my bowl stuck to the mixer and i had to use all my strength to get it unstuck. i took the fondant out of the bowl and decided to knead the rest by hand (i used about 1 1/2 - 1 3/4 bags of icing sugar, which should be about 3 1/2 cups or a little more. but now my fondant seems crumbly and dry.

i need help as soon as possible!!!!!! thanks for any help!

If I make a batch that is dry then I make another batch that I add much less ps (will be sticky) to and mix the 2 batches together.

I rarely add the whole amount of ps when I am making a batch. I like it to be a bit soft and sticky. Then I let it rest and if I need to add more ps later I do it the next day or several hours later.



Sorry to hear about your mixer.

"i used about 1 1/2 - 1 3/4 bags of icing sugar, which should be about 3 1/2 cups or a little more."

Not sure what you mean by this. Where are you from? In my neck of the woods, the smallest available bag of powdered sugar holds 2 pounds (32 oz.) Since a cup of powdered sugar weighs about 4 oz, that's 8 cups in a bag. So, 1 3/4 bags would be about 14 cups, not 3 1/2 cups.

At any rate, my MFF recipe calls for 3 1/2 pounds of powdered sugar, which would be 1 3/4 bags. So, if you're using 2 pound bags, the problem is not the amouunt of sugar. Did you wait until the heated mixture came down to luke warm? (just warmer than body temp, 100° - 110°) This is very important as too warm and it will melt the sugar, requiring more. Too cool and it will absorb less sugar than called for.

Not sure if this helps you at this point... I'd knead in add a little more of benign liquids (corn syrup, milk)

hey yeah sorry i m meant 3 1/2 lb not cups =) i did wait til it was lukewarm.. like the temperature of a baby's bottle.. it might have been to cold? =(

Baby bottle temp is just right. It should just barely feel warmer than you do.

Which recipe did you use?

Nevermind - misread a post

Nevermind, unecessary response to nadine's misread post.

Why can't we just delete posts anymore? There used to be a little 'X' in the upper right corner that let you delete posts within a certain time frame.