Other things to do with fondant – stamped sweets

After being scared of making my own fondant for ages, I found a very simple recipe for these small fondant sweets in Frankie Magazine’s cookbook, Sweet Treats. 

They reminded me of lollies that I used to get when I was little. Jade pointed out that I may be mistaken for a drug dealer trying to flog eccy tabs, but I think it’s worth the risk.

The fondant is sugar, water and gelatine that is boiled and then beaten until it forms a white mass that you can ball up loosely. You then dust your hands with icing sugar and knead it for 5 minutes or so until it starts to look shiny on the surface. You can tint it whatever colour you want, I divided it up in three parts and did pink, blue and yellow. I used gel colouring and was very sparing because I wanted light pastel shades. 

Who knew that you could still buy paper doilies? Thanks Frankie for making them cool again.

 I found these tiny cello bags at Birchalls which seemed to suit the whole cutesy theme.

Flavouring was a problem for me, I experimented with using no flavour (pretty foul), vanilla (worse), lemon (not strong enough – need lots) and peppermint (quite nice). If I had rose water I would have tried that for the pink ones. Reckon it’s worth trying to match flavours and colours. Yellow – lemon, pink – rose, green or blue – peppermint.

The cut outs were small pastry cutters, continuing the childhood theme, the ones I used were actually ones that I have had since I was little, I used to use them with scraps of bread dough when Mum was making bread. On my last trip home I raided her kitchen cupboard and rediscovered them, thanks Mum for keeping them safe all this time!

The lettering was made with a DIY stamping kit that I bought at Birchall’s (newsagency), most big stationers would have something similar. The kit contains lots of individual rubber letter stamps, some stamp holders with parallel bars to slot the letters into, and a set of tweezers to help you pick up and position the letter stamps (they are about 2mm tall). So you can put together a stamp to say anything you want. I thought it would be nice to do some friends’ names. Great birthday or wedding present.

A word of warning, these are fragile when they have dried hard and are liable to break. Particularly packaged in the bags you have to be very careful with them.