I tried quilting effect on sides of a cake for the first time today. It was quite a distaster. What is the best timing for quilting? I used diamond cutter as a guide and a small quilter. I tried immediately after covering the cake with fondant (too soft and the pattern was not clear enough), continued and after 10 minutes fondant was too hard, the lines started to break and BC to show under. I rubbed some shortening into fondant to make it softer but did not help a lot. Any suggestion is welcome. Thanks.

Take a look at this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJglbsLxPZM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
She explains the quilting technique here very well.

I have not found this turorial very useful the way that the pattern has to be "fudged" when the embossing plate does not match the measurements of the cake would drive me to distraction. there MUST be a way of doing this without using this tool and getting the pattern to run accross the cake so that all the measurments are the same.

what is the point of taking time and effort to do this pattern if it cannot be purfect.