The most malleable of icings is making a comeback. Photograph by Katja Mayer.
Set Design by Miguel Bento. Last autumn, the British baker Sarah Hardy happened upon a painting by the late Colombian artist Fernando Botero, “Feliz Cumpleaños” (1971), depicting a cluttered dessert table piled with unevenly glazed éclairs, half-peeled fruit and, at the centre, a frilly cream-coloured layer cake topped with a grand dome. A few weeks later, Hardy, of the cult London cake studio Hebe Konditori, brought the painted confection to life, making a hazelnut, dulce de leche and vanilla base and lining the upper tiers with white chocolate buttercream and lemon curd. Once she shaped the cake using a pastry knife, she clad the entire tower with sheets of pink fondant, airbrushed electric yellow and cyan for a seamless matt effect. “I like when it doesn’t look 100 percent edible,” she said.
Fondant, also known as sugar paste or plastic icing, the cake decor most often associated with traditional weddings, may seem anachronistic in the realm of avant-garde baking. Contemporary cake trends favour a more organic aesthetic, layered with impressionistic overpiping or sprouting floral outgrowths. But a few bakers and pastry chefs are reclaiming the method, precisely for its retro, mass-market aesthetic. “We’re saturated with wobbly cakes or crazy flowers that aren’t even edible shoved on top of cake,” says the Brooklyn-based food designer Suea. “A masterpiece made of fondant makes you think, ‘Let’s just take it back to the classics.’ ”
In medieval Europe, fondant existed in the form of decorative filigreed sugar-paste follies. Later, during the Age of Enlightenment, bakers began to decorate cakes like petits fours with a silvery poured fondant glaze that hardened in the oven. Contemporary rolled fondant originated in the early 20th century as a trick of culinary engineering, made by mixing boiled sugar with softening and stabilising additives, typically glucose syrup, gelatin and glycerin. Gentler and more forgiving than royal icing, the brittle gloss associated with conventional British cake stylings, fondant was commercialised in the early 1960s as a premade ready-to-roll frosting, sold alongside instant custard mixes and cake batter emulsifiers.
Flattened out from a pliable brick, the icing resembles pie dough as it’s held aloft before being draped, in one fraught move, over a bare cake. The next step is to buff the icing until it’s as smooth and manicured as possible: free from wrinkles, air bubbles and blurred edges. At once clingy and protective, fondant prolongs the lifespan of a cake, turning it into what the British cultural historian Nicola Humble has called the type of food that “gets to sit around being looked at for quite a long time”.
On its own, fondant lacks texture and colour, making it, Hardy says, “the perfect backdrop”. Food-safe dyes adhere to it easily, and are in fact amplified by the icing’s bright white undertones from the powdered sugar. (In contrast, buttercream has a dulling effect.) Some bakers knead colour directly into it, as in the case of a streaky indigo-and-red marbled twist on the Sicilian ricotta-based cassata made by the Parisian food artist Andrea Sham. You can also paint directly on the icing with a watercolour brush or spray colour from an edible-ink pen, like the hazy, candy-hued stars and graffiti-style lettering stencilled onto Suea’s white layer cakes by her boyfriend, the skater and artist Trung Nguyen.
But fondant has one well-known downside: “It tastes overly sweet and like chalk,” says Suea, who tells her clients not to eat it. Other bakers have turned instead to fondant substitutes; Sham, for example, covers her Swedish princess cakes with a sheet of earth-toned almond paste finished with a scalloped black buttercream trim. The baker Mina Park, who owns the Brooklyn cake shop 99, approximates fondant with mochi. At a party for the designer Sandy Liang held on Manhattan’s Lower East Side this past northern autumn, she presented pink snowball mochis that resembled jewellery cushions, each one bearing a milk white strawberry. “These days I’m more interested in restraint,” says Park.
But sometimes only the original will do — the campier, the better. Last July, Lucy Chadwick, the British director of the contemporary art gallery Champ Lacombe in Biarritz, France, bought a cake on the spur of the moment at a local bakery to accompany the opening of her latest exhibition, a group show about the digital-age baroque. The confection was “brilliant in its opulent absurdity”, says Chadwick, who picked the cake — a stack of lemon sponge disks veneered in cheetah-print fondant — to echo the show’s themes of contemporary excess and kitsch. On display the next day in its gilt-backed cardboard box, alongside a surreal portrait by John Waters and a fuzzy purple faux-fur canvas, it looked almost like an uncanny art object of its own
