Im making a crawfish boil cake for this weekend. The actual cake it the pot like I've seen here on photos. My question is what is the best way to wrap the fondant around the cake. I'm thinking it's going to be too tall to lay fondant on top so I need to wrap the fondant around the cake. Any tips or suggestions to make this go as smoothly as possible???? Let it dry a little? Get another set of hands to help me just attach it? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Add a good dollop of CMC to your fondant, then roll out a rectangle the height and diameter of your cake. Dust it liberally with cornstarch and roll it up. Lay it around the side of the crumb-coated cake, unrolling as you go. Once it's in place, brush off the cornstarch and give the surface a once-over with a tiny bit of shortening. At least this is the method recommended by Sharon Zambito (my latest cake guru) in her "Sweet Luxuries" video, which you should definitely check out, if you have a chance.

Will that make the fondant really hard and non-edible? I know it dries it faster, but was still wanting the fondant to be something some people want to eat since I am not using much icing around the cake. Thanks. I just bought all of Sharon's videos so I will have to watch that one. Kari

Actually, I find that CMC doesn't change the flavor at all and it's totally edible. It's kind of like gelatin on speed, if you know what I mean. It doesn't get all that hard, either, just gives the fondant enough body to be workable. I have to say that in that video, she uses a whole lot more CMC than I do, but I don't think it matters all that much. It helps if you let the fondant set up for several hours after you add the CMC - it takes a while for it to work.

What is CMC? TIA!!

CMC is a powder, gum arabic and gum tragacanth. It's sold in most cake supply stores. It's used as a thickening agent and in edible glue to stick fondant and gumpaste pieces together. I think it's an abbreviation for carbomethylcellulose or something like that. The difference between CMC and those other two things is that they are natural products, while CMC is a manufacutred chemical compound. That, and the fact that CMC costs about a third as much as gum tragacanth (at least where l live).