Now is the time to decorate and embellish your rich Christmas cake. Wow all your friends and family with a superbly adorned cake! With fondant and marzipan as the traditional means of decorating, we have outlined a step by step approach to covering a Christmas cake in fondant, as well as making a few easy little figurines to top the cake.

fondant decorations1

  1. Paint the surface of the marzipan-covered cake with alcohol or water (not too much as you certainly don’t want a “mushy” wet marzipan surface), or use smooth apricot jam. This allows the fondant to stick to the marzipan layer below.
  2. Roll out your fondant on a lightly dusted surface, measure the top and sides of your cake and compare this against the rolled out fondant – just to be sure that the fondant is sufficient to cover the entire cake.
  3. Use your rolling pin to lift and gently drape the icing onto the cake.
  4. Flatten the top before tucking the icing around the sides.
  5. Trim off the excess fondant with a knife.
  6. Smooth the top and sides of the cake with a warm hand or by using a cake smoother.

For a few more tips on covering cakes with fondant, have a look at our post on Nicoletta’s guide to playing with fondant, where we have calculated how much fondant is needed to cover cakes of different sizes, and also displayed our colour chart for mixing fondants.

We made a small fondant Christmas tree decorated with metallic “Bling” balls, and brightly coloured presents to bring our Christmas cake to life. These figurines were so easy to make, all we needed was corn starch (Maizina) for dusting surfaces and hands, and edible glue (make edible glue by mixing a piece of white fondant with a small amount of water). Moulding decorations can be festive fun for the kids, just think of fondant as “edible play-dough”.