Professional Looking Cake Design

In my spare time (ha!) I've been working on improving my bakery skills, i.e., baking cakes & decorating them. Ideally, I would like to have a part-time job of making cakes for friends and family, but at the moment, I am just refining my skills. A "practice" wedding cake:


This cake is from a class I took last fall at the local community college. It's covered in fondant, which is all the rage in cake decorating. While my instructor suggested that we use Wilton fondant on our cakes, a classmate of mine told me about a recipe for marshmallow fondant that has saved me time AND money. Good combo, right?

Check out the recipe & let me know what you think. It tastes waaaay better than traditional fondant, and certainly costs a whole lot less. And if you were going to make your own fondant with that whole gelatin method, let me save you a lot of hassle, and say that this is the way to go...

I hasten to add that this type of fondant is best for sculptural type decorating, i.e., making a bow to put on top of the cake. The marshmallow fondant is generally too stiff to use to cover a cake- that's when you invest in the Wilton.