Good Morning All,

I have been STALKING the board now for weeks.... I am very very new to this... My Mother was a cake and candy shop owner back in the day, she used marizpan I think it is called.. I consider myself an artsy kinda people and love to create things. I have posted the first cake I made in my photos. I am now wanting to mold shapes. I am confused to say the least. I have played with fondant the last week, and enjoy it alot! My problem is I find it is staying soft and I am wanting to make a few people for a farm cake, and also a high heel shoe I have a pattern for. any advice onw aht I should use or what works best? it is just pratcie makes perfect. I saw satin ice was wayyy cheaper online than anything I can find locally. Any and all help would be greatly appericated!!! I will try and up load a pic of my first try.

Have a wonderful day!
Shelly

Fondant gets hard after a week but gumpaste will hard in an hour or more. You can mix both in varying portions. You might want to look up mmf- marshmallow fondant. mmf 101 is great tasty, easy to make, and cheap. Takes time but worth it. Check out youtube for demos on sculpting. Good Luck

Thanks for replying, I really think I am rolling it to thin, Thinking that I am using to much!

For figures I'd use a mix of half fondant, half gumpaste, if you've got enough time for them to dry completely. If you need them to dry fast, then use just gumpaste. For shoes, I'd just use gumpaste.

I've bought Satin Ice gumpaste before and it was much softer (and harder to work with) than the homemade stuff I usually use. I use Nicholas Lodge's gumpaste recipe with the tylose.

Thanks for the tips, I have the stuff to make MMF and was going to try but was told I could only use it to cover a cake ... I looked up the recipe the fondant that you use Texas Rose and I am going to get the stuff needed. I will check local store and see if she has any tylose .. if not I will order it online and try it then, for now I will do 50/50 fondant and gumpaste since I have that one hand and try my figures there once I find instructions , I found some for flat ppl. Also I will try out the shoe in gumpaste and see how well i get with that. Thanks again, I just love this board and all the friendly ppl I ahve found and seen here!

You can make figures and decorations too with MMF, but you can't roll it as thin as gumpaste. Sometimes MMF decorations will take a week to dry, and the heavier ones, like an upright figure, may compress slightly from the weight, so that you end up with shorter, thicker people than you were planning on.

You can get molds to make gumpaste people...I have a Sculpey dollmaker mold that I got at Michaels that makes a fairy...but you have to do so much shaping to make it look right that it would be just as good to make the fairy by rolling logs of gumpaste and then shaping them. One thing that helps when you make legs and arms to attach to the torso, make an indentation in the torso with a ball tool and then make a part on the end of the leg or arm to fit into that indentation.