I am going to make my daughters wedding cake and she wants an earthy nature theme with mushrooms, flowers etc. I am thinking about the birch cake but she hates the taste of fondant. Does gumpaste taste any different and how can I do the cake its self to look like birch not using fondant? Thanks

Hello,

Hope I can help a bit. Gum paste dries too hard to be edible. It tastes worse than fondant! There is a brand of fondant out there that tastes great. It is called fondarific and they have a lot of different flavors. That being said, you could buttercream. There is a great book by Roland Winbeckler, I got it on Amazon. com, that is about buttercream flowers. It shows you how to do so many nice arrangements of flowers including mushrooms, acorns, pinecones.

Hope this helps some!

Christine

Hopefully you will get much more expert responses than mine, but I do want to say that I am pretty sure gumpaste is never used for actually eating - meaning, it's edible, but it is used for flowers that dry very hard, not for covering a whole cake. True, true that many fondants taste horrible. If you're going to purchase it premade, try Satin Ice. The chocolate version is especially tasty.

patti

Now see, I think Satin Ice has a "chemical" taste to it. I love Pettinice. The chocolate is delicious and the white tastes good too!

Jodie

See and I don't like Pettinice or Satin Ice. I think they both taste like chemicals. The only one that I like the taste of so far is Michelle Foster's recipe. I guess its all personal preference.

Danielle

Have you tried homemade marshmallow fondant? It tastes delicious. That's all I use now. It is good for covering the cakes, drapes, ribbons, etc. I find that Satin Ice taste gross; better than Wilton, but still gross. I hear that Fondarific tastes fruity and great.

You can ice the cake with buttercream and airbrush the color and pattern on. With buttercream you can also give it the texture you want. The flowers could all be made with buttercream, you can air dry them and arrange on the cake the same as fondant flowers. The mushrooms can be made from meringue. I did a cake with a tree stump and fall leaves and a mushroom at the base.

http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1269305

Thanks for all the advice... by the way Ihave NEVER made a decoative cake before.. except a diaper cake lol but I am pretty crafty.

Blasphemy! (About the fondant tasting yucky part, not the rest of it ).

You might want to try (if you still have plenty of time) to make a small batch of marshmallow fondant or Michelle Foster's stuff, as previous posters had mentioned, and then having your daughter taste that. A lot of people have it in their head that it tastes bad because they have either only had store-bought, or because it might have "traditionally" been less appetizing than other forms of icing. Since it's not the texture she's opposed to, but the taste, you can probably whip up a very tasty batch and possibly change her mind. More than anything, if you have never decorated cakes before, it might actually be easier to make all of the little details out of fondant or gumpaste since it's similar to clay, instead of trying to make them from buttercream - in my humble opinion, while fondant does tend to show any imperfections in your cake itself, piping details with buttercream can take a good deal of skill, but molding small mushrooms out of "clay" might be a bit easier to tackle and to get just right (regardless of what you cover the actual cake with).

-Emi.

I love MMF (marshmallow fondant). I use Rhonda's Ultimate MMF recipe and it is located in the recipe section here. It takes me about 15 mintues to make and isn't really hard. I recommend trying it just to see if she might like it. It's not expensive either.

Massa gruschina tates very neutral and nice and FondX aint bad either.