The Foodthusiast: Tutorial: Making Fondant Look Like Wood

I do a lot of specialty cakes. It started out by making a cake using the Wilton pans you see all over Joann Fabrics or Michaels and evolved to me carving cakes to look like anything I wanted. I have always been very artistic, so carving cake was pretty easy for me. I have had my fair share of culinary abortions. I remember the Dora the Explorer cake I made had a bit too much orange in the skin tone and she ended up looking like a member of the Jersey Shore. Fake tan anyone? This was a long time ago, and my skills have definitely been upgraded. I was tested with making a cake for my friend's 50th birthday party. She is a fan of drinking, Budweiser in particular, but she also plays on a dart league from time to time. I decided I was going to make a beer bucket cake and I wanted to show you all how to make fondant look like wood grain. You will, of course, need plenty of fondant, but you will also need some other tools. Here are some of the basics you will need:

Rolling Pin, Clear Alcohol, Brush, Food Coloring, Cutting Tool

1.) Rolling Pin to roll out the fondant.

2.) Clear alcohol like vodka or rum

3.) Paint brush

4.) Cutting tool like a knife, X-Acto Blade or even clay tools

5.) Food coloring. I prefer to use Americolor. This is Americolor Chocolate Brown.

I love using clay tools for my fondant! Fondant is very similar to clay in so many ways and I find that it always works very well!

STEP ONE : ROLLING

First, roll out the fondant to the desired length and width. You will want your fondant to be a little on the thick side, maybe 1/4". This will really make the lines of the wood grain pop out. If you roll it too thin, you will go through the fondant making transferring it to the cake a difficult it not impossible feat. Trim the sides, top and bottom, to be squared off so it looks like a plank of wood.

Keeping the fondant thick will help with lines

STEP TWO: LINES and KNOTS

Add lines using your cutting tool. Wood grain has all sorts of lines. Some turn into circular shapes, some form knots, some do not even go all the way down. For the purpose of these, I used very bold lines to make my wood grain. You can do anything you like, but make sure the grain of the wood follows the same general direction.

You can see that I started by making lines that go from the top to the bottom. I even added little swirls in the wood and even tore up the fondant a little to make a knot. The picture below even had some of the wood taken out from the top and the bottom. Imperfections are key to making the wood look more natural. Nothing is perfect. Now we can move on to the painting!

Imperfections make the wood look more natural.

STEP THREE: PAINTING

When I mix my coloring, I always use a shot glass. You do not need a lot of color or a lot of alcohol. I use maybe 1/8th of a teaspoon of liquid coloring followed by about twice as much alcohol. The more alcohol you use, the lighter the wood will be. Of course, the opposite is true as well. Use less alcohol for darker wood! Now, before you start to paint here are some tips. If the wood will be a decoration: say a sign or the handle of some sort of tool, it is probably better to paint it separately. If this is going to be part of the cake, say the bucket for my beer bucket cake, I used a damp paper towel to wet the BACK of the fondant and I put all the fondant boards on first before I painted it. Here is the reason why, if you try to put fondant that is soaked in "paint" on your cake, you will add finger prints everywhere to the cake as have difficult manipulating the planks to fit together properly. I could have let it dry first THEN put it on the cake, but by letting fondant sit out, you lose the ability to manipulate it without cracking it. For this tutorial, I am not putting it on the cake, but for the bucket, I added it first and then I painted it. I use a paint brush to mix up the coloring and the alcohol and then I just painted with the grain. The brush will actually add some more texture to the fondant. When it dries, the alcohol will evaporate.

TIP: Use heavier paint by the knot because those are always a little darker.