I am using a fifty fifty blend (fondant and gum paste) for roses and leaves, tinted it ivory using Wilton color. It has developed small beads in it and is no longer smooth! Like tiny pebbles and it did not get dried out! Does anyone know what would cause this? It is marshmallow fondant. Did I use too much ivory color?

I just made almost the same exact thing last night. I used the pre-made gumpaste and marshmallow fondant to make roses.

I was making the marshmallow fondant, and I used the rest of a previouslly opened bag of powdered sugar, as I was mixing the fondant, when it was hardening up, I noticed a bunch of tiny white hard pebbles all thoughout it. I figured out that, that in particular bag of sugar, the powdered sugar was (for some strange reason) full of hard sugar pebbles. So, I sifted the sugar from that particular bag and had to make more fondant, which came out smooth.

I ended up using the white pebbley fondant anyway, I rolled it out as thin as I could, and that crushed some of the sugar pebbles. Then I kneaded small fist-full's of it and that broke up more of the pebbles. I still had some pebbles, but it was not as bad.

Either make more, and sift the sugar, or, roll, knead, roll, knead until you can get as much out as possible. Luckily yours is Ivory, mine was/is blue

Hey thanks for sharing. I will try that in the future.

Did the bumps develop after you had mixed it up and it had sat for a while, or right after you mixed it? If the gumpaste had dried out a little on the surface of the ball of paste and you knead it into fondant the dried pieces can make the bumps. You'll either need to just brush them off when they come to the surface, or crush them so that you can re-knead them in. You can also run it through a pasta machine a bunch of times to crush the bumps and reincorporate the sugar into the mixture, sometimes that works.