Fourth of July Cake - Fourth of July cake - Preparing fondant

Now we'll prepare our fondant. This is, you can buy this in the cake decorating specialty store. And it's a readymade fondant but you do need to prepare it. Right now if you see, it's very crackly and we need to knead it until it's smooth. Now to knead it you want to make sure that your hands are really scrubbed clean because the fondant will pick up anything on your hands. And you want to make sure that you're not wearing any linty clothing and keep your hair back because the fondant really does pick up anything on it around. And you want to make sure that you're working on a very clean surface. So a piece of baking paper or lined table or a plastic that is designated just for working with fondant is a great thing to have. Make sure it's nice and clean. To knead the fondant, you want to just take a little bit of shortening or margarine and just coat your hands like that, and then you want to squeeze it and knead it. The best way to knead it is to roll it and fold it and roll it and fold it. And you want to knead this fondant until it becomes smooth and you don't get any of this cracking look to it at all. It should be completely smooth. And then we'll add colors. We're going to be making red, yellow and blue and we're going to do it in fairly intense colors. I'm just going to take a small amount right now. And to add color, I've got this, a nice, thick paste color. You don't want to use liquid colors for the fondant because they make the fondant too loose and sticky. So take the paste type coloring, and you want to just dip a toothpick in there and, and push it into the fondant and then fold that over. You want to try to avoid getting too much of the food coloring on your hands. So you keep it in the middle. And then you do, you roll and you fold and you continue this until you, you've got a solid color. You see as you, every time you knead it, it gets mixed in a little bit more. So do this for all of the colors that we'll be using and then I'll show you how to make a fun, exciting Fourth of July cake.