Let’s say you want to go into fondant cake market but you don’t know-how. Or you are not sure if you are qualified to be in. My short answer is, No, you don’t need a degree to be in this industry. Speaking from our own experience, Both Jean & Nic are from architecture and marketing backgrounds and we have zero experience in baking or we haven’t heard of ‘fondant’ to begin with. The idea of entering the fondant cake market is starting from our hobby. Then until one fine day, we receive an order from a friend to request for fondant cake for his son's birthday party. And we never stop from then onwards.
We always believe that we all have to start somewhere, yesterday is always the best time, today is already the second-best time to start something. So, if you like or if you have the dream to enter this industry, please do so now. Do some practise first before you take in your first order. You don’t have to charge your customer from the beginning if you are not confident, ‘benefits’ some friends or families to begin with, then you get to accumulate experience and build up your profile from there. You just need to remember this: A master is once a disaster. No one is born a genius to make a fondant cake. For as long as you like what you are doing, you are already in a very good starting position.
What if you don’t know how to bake a cake or how to make fondant cake? Many videos are teaching a lot of free classes to bake and to make fondant cake out there. If not, you can always join our free class Facebook group to learn about fondant cake. Because you don’t know what you don’t know until you see other people doing it.
So, what is so good about fondant cake? Although there isn’t any official info stating the actual origin of fondant cakes. But through the research that we did, It can be dated back to as early as the 16th century. You might wonder if fondant cake can ‘survive’ for so long in our world, what makes it so special? First of all, fondant cake is originally designed for the royal palace, the design and workmanship that is put in to create a fondant is not only to make it tasty but also to make sure the aesthetic value is up to the level. Therefore, we think this is one of the top reasons that make a fondant cake being at the highest level of all cakes. Also, unlike other cream cakes, fondant can be displayed at room temperature for a long time without melting. This makes fondant cake the perfect choice for a birthday party display. In almost most of our cake orders so far, our fondant cake is always the centrepiece of the birthday decor, photo-taking ops are almost guaranteed. It can uplift your birthday celebration almost instantaneously. One more reason why fondant cake can stand out from the rest is that it can create almost any design with it. From simple animal figurines to hyper-realistic human figurines, the design is almost unlimited. We think that is the reason why fondant cake is so famous among all other cakes type.
Do you need any fundamental training to become a fondant cake artist? Yes, for sure! Here are the steps that we recommend for you to start your fondant cake journey.
- Fondant cake covering: practise how to cover a fondant cake. You need your fondant cake to at least look neat.
- Simple decoration: using some basic shape cutter (round shape) to start your cake decoration with a polka dot design. Play with simple two-tone colour matching. Ideally, start with a very pastel colour tone as it will make your cake look so much lovable.
- Improve your colour sense to match your cake design at least to match your customer request. the fundamental is easy, just follow the basic RGB colour chart that we learn since primary or secondary school. If not, just buy more of those edible colours from the baking supply shops to mix with your fondant.
- Improve your skill to start making some simple 3D figurines. It is always good to start with some cartoon animal character. Safari theme animals seem to be a good start for this purpose, and there are many free tutorials to teach about this.
- Basic human figurine (low detail): it seems like being able to make a basic human figurine is a milestone to achieve in your fondant cake journey. Once you unlock this skill, you will gain much higher confidence to continue the fondant cake journey.
- Complex design: Try to challenge complex structural design and apply advanced level colouring effects. Suggest learning from miniature modelling making tutorial to upgrade the effect or colour finishing.
Above is our suggestion to start your fondant cake journey, you don’t have to feel stress if you cannot achieve up to the highest level because the fundamental concept to enter fondant cake market is suppose to be enjoyable. Achieving the highest level or not doesn't stop you from making this a side business or even as the main business. Treat this as a skill or an art form, you will find it even more enjoyable.
Until this point, we want to unveil a small secret about the baking school in Malaysia. There are many baking schools in our country, but how many can really teach good fondant cake? Some in fact only touch upon a little bit about fondant cake. To excel into a fondant cake master, it is always depending on your personal practice. To speed up the tourney, you always need to sign up classes from individual masters in the market in order to excel. Therefore, before you want to enter the baking industry, you might want to think about this in order to have a clearer mind.
Of cause, we welcome more talent to enter the fondant cake industry so that more and more new ideas will emerge. We need to create healthy competition in this industry in order to grow the fondant cake scene. The competition we are talking about is not price competition, because there will always be another baker who is willing to offer a lower price. But what we want to see is the growth of standard and the growth of art value. Because if you have gone through the learning stages, you will know that in order to produce a good quality fondant cake, you have to invest a lot of time and practice, fail many times, throw away don’t know how many kilos of fondant in order to achieve what you want to achieve. So, like a fondant cake artist, we need to educate the market on how to appreciate fondant cake, more voices in the market will create more comparison, and from then only we can bring the industry to the next level.