What is Sugarpaste?
Sugarpaste, which also goes by the name of fondant icing, is an extremely versatile and sweet tasting sugar dough. Its primary use is for covering cakes and cupcakes by creating a smooth, regular icing finish and one of its great advantages is that its simplicity and versatility make it suitable for use by complete novices as well as accomplished experts.
Sugarpaste, which can be bought as a ready made product, has a long shelf life. Furthermore, it is available in a range of colours or alternatively special colouring products can be added to create just about any shade you can think of. The traditional food colourants are not suitable for colouring sugarpaste as they change the consistency of the dough making it sticky and difficult to work with. It is possible to make your own sugarpaste and many cake decorators in fact prefer to do so. However, some aficionados claim that creating a truly white paste is difficult with home-made varieties and home-made sugarpaste will not store for any where near as long as the shop bought alternatives.
The ready- or home-made dough is then rolled out to the required size and thickness to create a one-piece covering for cakes. Although it is possible to create good standard finished products with minimal accoutrements, regular cake decorators will often have a range of purpose specific accessories to help them achieve their goal. Included in this are such things as special rolling pins, cut and roll mats which have pre-marked sizes on them, modelling tools, smoothers and various cutters and templates.
Because it can be shaped and moulded, sugarpaste is also used to create edible cake embellishments and decorations as an alternative to using florist or flower paste. Flower paste, which is a different product to sugarpaste, sets much harder and although both are equally edible, sugarpaste has a sweeter and more pleasant taste. Where more delicate creations are necessary or more rigidity is needed sugarpaste is perhaps less suitable than flower paste but a product called Gum Tragacanth can be added to sugarpaste to give any work a little extra strength. Using sugarpaste, cake makers can create any type of decoration they choose including flowers, bows and leaves and the product is particularly suitable for making sturdy figures of people and animals.
Although no-one is suggesting that any first attempts at using sugarpaste will be perfect, beginners are often surprised how easily they can work the product and achieve professional looking results from the outset; progress can be made very quickly and more complex projects undertaken within a short space of time. For those without any natural artistic flair or imagination there are a huge wealth of resources through books, Internet sites and classes, which give hundreds of ideas and various hints and tips. In no time at all it could be your creations that others marvel at and its up to you whether or not you pass on the secret of its simplicity.
