Search for your favourite snacks

Fondant Fancy

Rated 86.05%
281 votes

Take one bank holiday weekend and one loooooong journey from London to Leeds – plenty of time to daydream about reaching the pinnacle of snack-pimphood and pimping a snack worthy of being featured on this site. A brief visit to M&S later and a pimp was born… I was inspired! We would spend the weekend pimping a fondant fancy, king of the posh snack-cake world.

Ingredients:

For the cake(s):
18oz butter
18oz self-raising flour
18oz golden caster sugar
9 eggs
3 teaspoons baking powder

For the filling in the top:
Erm… a load of butter, and a load of sugar (icing sugar and caster sugar), plus a splash of milk.

For the icing:
I believe we used in the region of 1KG icing sugar (that’s right, a kilogram)
Juice of 1 lemon
Hot water
Yellow food colouring

Total calories. Muffin reckons it’s about 8000 (versus about 105 for a normal fancy). And he’s a doctor, so he should know.

Having decided on our pimping project, we sought out a sponge recipe (all hail saint Delia!). As luck would have it, we had a square tin of a suitable size (8 bitchin’ inches, and 1.5 inches deep – according to Delia, size does matter), and decided that by stacking 3 cakes on top of each other, we could make the cube necessary for our fancy. Hence, the ingredients above will make three cakes (according to Delia, each cake serves 8 people, so we’re talking mega-fancy here people).

Off to Sainsbury’s and home with the goods. And set to work!

Phase 1: bake three square cakes

Rather than make one mega-load of cake mix, we decided to make three separate cakes – this is more accurate, and, more importantly, allows you to lick the bowl three times (warning, may cause biliousness). So get baking!

Important things to remember when baking cakes:

– Sift that flour, baby!

NB Do not attempt to sift caster sugar mixed in with flour, as it takes ages and is really stupid (not like in the picture, which shows marvellous sugar-free sifting).

Make sure the butter is really soft, or the beaters will just keep breaking and falling out. We had to nuke ours, but don’t go microwave crazy, or you just get liquid butter and have to wait ages for it to cool down and set again.

Preheat the oven. Otherwise you have to take the (raw) cake out and wait 15 minutes while the damn thing heats up. Set your timer to avoid burning your cakes.

Use oven gloves

We got a bit creative with the second cake, but the writing didn’t come out when it had risen.

With only 2 tins, and three cakes to make, we had to do a fair bit of waiting around. The solution? Tea!
By the time we were on cake three, we’d started messing about with other utensils, such as the zester, so we decided to add some lemon zest to make our last cake more interesting.

Bored of waiting and bored of tea, we cracked open the wine. So, after all this, we had
three cakes! (and let me just say that the weird sinister boy thing in the background is nothing to do with me).

These needed to cool before we could move on to the next stage. Time for… a barbeque! (and more wine). Many sausages later, we returned for phase 2 of the pimping.

Phase 2: create a cake cube.

Make the butter cream stuff. This will go on the top to make the lumpy bit, as well as sticking the cakes together. We used the left over caster sugar (too gritty – avoid in future pimps) and a load of icing sugar, about a whole bar of butter (softened), and some milk. Beat like crazy with the beaters or a wooden spoon (or both! But not at the same time).

Slice the tops off the bottom two cakes so that the stack will sit flush and not topple over (or require vast amounts of butter cream stuff to fill the gaps).
Use the butter cream goo to stick the stack of cakes together.

Our tins weren’t exactly the same size (curse you, sainsbury’s) so we trimmed the edges to make our cube perfect. Unfortunately I’m not very good at trimming…

With the stack complete, we were ready for phase 3, lumping and icing…

We moulded the butter cream goo stuff into a mound or hump (cue for song: my hump, my hump …), plonked it on top of the stack, and smoothed it with a knife for good measure.

We then prepared the icing. We had decided on a yellow fancy rather than red, mostly on a whim. Though yellow is nearly the colour of gold, which is of course the most bling of all colours. In order to be true to the original, we used lemon juice to make the icing for that real lemony tang. In my opinion this also makes the super-sized fancy a health food as it officially contains vitamin C.

For this baby, you need a LOT of icing. I wasn’t joking about the kilogram of icing sugar in the ingredients list. Make the icing nice and thick so it doesn’t run off the sides. And don’t forget that yellow colouring. NB save some icing sugar because you’ll need white icing for the stripes.

Get icing quick, before the icing sets in the bowl!

We let the icing set for a while (half of Green Wing), then went back and used a knife dipped in hot water to make it good and smooth. By this point, I had eaten so much raw cake mix/cake trimmings/icing that I was practically a fondant fancy myself. I also discovered that eating this much sugar before bedtime makes sleep virtually impossible and gives you a sugar comedown headache in the morning.

Next, the white stripes (the icing, not the band, hahaha… sorry, sugar overload). The Mr Kipling fancy we’re using for comparison has (in my opinion, inferior) brown stripes, but the M&S original that inspired us had white stripes, and we decided to be true to our muse.

And lo and behold, the finished, super-sized, pimptastic, monster fancy!

See how tiny a real fondant fancy is in comparison. Muffin reckons our fancy is 125 times the volume of a standard fancy.

And the obligatory cross section.

Ours is stripey on the inside because of sticking the three cakes together, but otherwise PERFECT! And it tastes mighty fine too.

Comments

Previous articleGiant KitKat
Next articleFrench Fancy

Similar Pimps

8,904FansLike
0FollowersFollow
1FollowersFollow
399SubscribersSubscribe
- Partner Spotlight -TechToSpeech - Cloud News & Tutorials

Latest Pimps

Comments