Homemade Rolled Fondant Recipe- Vegan Option, No Specialty Ingredients, No Artificial Ingredients, Uncooked, Healthier

I make gluten free decorated cakes for people sometimes, as a side job. I make them as processed/unhealthy ingredient free as possible, with the only bad ingredient being white sugar for the frosting (because otherwise you can't really have a white base to work with). I had a cake I was supposed to make for tomorrow, and then at the last minute, I realized that I didn't know how on earth I'd be making the cake, as I typically make a coconut oil and powdered sugar buttercream style frosting, and as I type, my coconut oil is sitting in its container on my shelf, as liquidy as water. Not exactly frosting making material.
I was trying to figure out what to do instead of buttercream, came up with all sorts of ideas, but none of them exactly what I was looking for. Then someone suggested fondant.
I never made fondant before, because all fondant recipes called for all sorts of expensive specialty ingredients, or unhealthy ingredients, required a million steps and were very easy to mess up.

However, I'd remembered my friend Ewa talking about how easy it is to make homemade fondant, so I asked her for her recipe- she said powdered sugar, egg whites, and corn syrup, mixed together to make a dough. She wasn't able to give me exact proportions, but just told me to play around until I got it right.

Well, I knew I wouldn't be making it Ewa's way, because I don't use corn syrup. But I figured that honey has the same consistency, and I didn't see why it wouldn't work with honey instead.

And so I made it, and I think it came out amazingly! I am really excited about this!


A few days after making this the first time, I played around with this recipe, and made it with flax gel (flax seeds boiled with water until egg white consistency- recipe and uses for this in a future post hopefully soon) in place of the egg whites, and with a vegan syrup instead of the honey (I used date syrup) and it came out great!
Next time I want to try it with powdered coconut sugar.
But in the meantime, I am really psyched, and am already thinking about ideas how to make the perfect birthday cake for my sons' birthdays coming up next month.
By the way- if you're worried about the safety of raw egg whites- you can buy pasteurized egg whites, or use the flax gel.

So, here's how I did it. This quantity was enough to cover a large cake and still only use half of the fondant. If you're using a smaller cake, feel free to halve it.

Ingredients:
~9 cups powdered sugar
4 egg whites from small eggs or as much flax gel is needed
1/4 cup honey, or vegan syrup alternative- ideally as light colored as possible, as a darker syrup will make your fondant dark. Brown rice syrup, jaggery syrup, agave nectar, or even a simple sugar syrup should work.
Homemade beet food coloring- about 1 tablespoon

Instructions:
1. If you want white fondant, mix about 6 1/2 cups powdered sugar with 4 egg whites from small eggs or 2-3 large egg whites, and 1/4 cup honey.

2. Mix it very well, and try to get it to be a dough-like consistency. If you find it is too sticky, add more and more powdered sugar, 1/4 cup at a time until you have a good pliable, but non sticky dough.

3. Knead your fondant for a few minutes until it is smooth, then get to work.



4. However, if you want pink fondant, like I did, add the juice of 1/3 of a beet (I grated mine in the smaller blade on my grater, then squeezed the liquid out into a bowl using a cloth, and used that liquid) and then mix it in, and add more and more powdered sugar until it is once again a good pliable consistency that isn't too sticky. Altogether, I used about 9 cups of powdered sugar for this batch.



5. Once you have your fondant. roll it between two sheets of parchment paper, as thinly as you can. To prevent it from sticking to your parchment paper if it isn't 100% non sticky, sprinkle the parchment paper with more powdered sugar.

6. Cut the fondant into the shape you want, and put it over your cake. My client asked for a section of the cake to be frosting free, so I used a pizza cutter to cut my fondant into shapes, then draped it over the cake where I desired.
P.S. As I said, this is my first time ever using fondant, so I don't know how you're "really" supposed to do it.

7. I wet my finger a bit, and smoothed the seams between the fondant parts as best as I could. Then I used my pizza cutter to trim the excess fondant off the bottom of the cake.

8. With the extra fondant pieces, I made a rose by placing petals together into a rosette shape, then made green fondant by mixing in spirulina powder (and enough water so that it wasn't too dry). I made the stem of the rose by adding cocoa powder and activated charcoal to a fondant snake.

The cake was a hit, everyone loved it, and they said the frosting tasted great.

Oh- I did add writing onto the cake with royal icing afterward, but I didn't post the pictures with their names out of respect to my client's privacy.

I really can't wait to work with fondant again! It was honestly so much easier to work with than buttercream frostings, and it just looks so much better and more professional.

And best of all- it didn't melt in the heat!

Have you ever made fondant before? What was in yours? Does this seem like a recipe you'd try? 
Any tips to a new fondant maker, how to best work with fondant, or any youtube channels you think would be the most educational and helpful with that?