Happy National Day, Singapore!

National Day is coming.  My sis-in-law invited us to her place to celebrate.  I decided to make some cupcakes and get the kids to decorate it there at her place.  However, I was worried that all the icing and creaming maybe a little too messy (don't want her to be cleaning the house after we left), so decide to do a not so messy icing, that is, a fondant.  At least it's like playing playdough for the kids and it wouldn't create too much of a mess.  Search the web for an easy recipe and stumble upon this Marshmallow Fondant from allrecipes.com  I decided to give it a try, it was actually quite easy.  I made 2 colour, one white and one red as that's our Singapore Flag's colour.  However, I make a huge mess with my first attempt as I was too eager to knead the dough, so I added half the icing into the marshmallow and started kneading it, it was a sticky messy and it took me almost an hour to get the dough into the correct texture.  So for my next attempt, I have learnt from my mistake, I melt the marshmallow with a little water, then pour in as much of the icing as I can until I form a really stiff dough, than I put on a disposable gloves, coated it with lots of butter, take a chopping board and put it with lots of icing, then took out the entire dough and started kneaded it.  It was so much easier this time round and I manage to get the dough ready in 15 minutes....phew....

I also realised that I should make the dough in small portion as it was so much easier to handle since I'm using it for cupcakes.  Here's my small portion recipe:

Marshmallow Fondant

• 100g of Marshmallow
• 2 teaspoon of water
• 250g to 300g of icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp of vanilla essence
• food colouring
• 1 tbs of butter

1. Put marshmallow and water in a microwavable bowl and microwave for 30sec to melt the marshmallow.
2. Stir in the vanilla essence and food colouring and 100g of icing sugar. Wait for a while and let the mixture cool down.
3. Pour in another 200g of icing sugar and stir until you form a very stiff mixture.
4. Put dough in a flat surface, preferably on a chopping board or something that won't get stained by the food colouring, that have been generously covered with icing sugar. Then wear a disposable gloves and apply a generous amount of butter or shortening on the gloves.
5. Start kneading the dough until it become soft and pialable.  Then wrap dough in a cling wrap and refrigerate overnight or until ready to use.
6. To use the dough, take it out of the refridgerator to let it soften slightly before working on it.  Enjoy!

This is how the end result looks like with the carrot cupcakes and cream cheese frosting that I made in my next post.  The fondant kinda melted when the kids was working on it, so it looks kinda messy but the fondant was really tasty, the kids was eating it while decorating the cakes.