Adding food coloring to fondant is a simple, albeit messy, process. My first suggestion is to wear rubber gloves unless you’d like to end up with purple hands! My second suggestion is to use gel coloring instead of liquid food coloring. Fondant can become very sticky, and using a gel instead of a liquid helps to keep the fondant as solid as possible.
Coloring Fondant with Gel Icing Color
Kneading the Food Coloring into the Fondant
Fondant finished and ready for use
Begin by covering your workspace in powdered sugar. This will help keep the fondant from sticking to your work surface (and your hands). The next step is to add a small amount of gel color to the fondant. The easiest way to do this is to dip a toothpick into the color of your choice and then swipe the toothpick along the fondant. Less is more when you begin adding the color; you can always add more later if you desire a darker color, but it’s not always easy to “de-sticky” your fondant when it becomes too wet. Knead the fondant thoroughly until you have achieved the color you want.
Let the fondant rest for about an hour before using so that it will harden a bit, and you’re ready to go!
This has to be one of the easiest and most fun shaped cakes to make. It’s great to create with children, and there’s very little chance of doing anything that can’t be fixed. It incorporates both buttercream and fondant, but there are many variations that can be introduced. Instead of buttercream cheese, grated white chocolate can be used. A fruit pie glaze would work as tomato sauce instead of buttercream cookie frosting, and a variety of candies and cookies can be used as toppings.
To keep things simple for this recipe, a refrigerated sugar cookie dough was used. You can use a cake mix instead; just keep in mind that you’re using a pizza pan with a much larger surface area and will need less cooking time for your cake. For sugar cookie dough, be sure that your dough is soft enough to easily spread across the entire pan using either your fingers or a spoon. Bake the cookie at 350 degrees for about ten minutes, and you should end up with a nice edge that is high on the outside, looking very similar to pizza crust.
Use Refrigerated Cookie Dough as Pizza Crust.
Sugar Cookie Pizza Crust
Baked and Cooled Cookie Dough Pizza Crust
Next comes the fun part. After your cookie has cooled, use a cookie buttercream frosting in red to make tomato sauce. Let it firm, and then use buttercream (in a shade of ivory) coupled with a straight decorating tip to create strands of mozzarella cheese.
Buttercream Mozzarella Pizza Cheese
Pizza Cake Tomato Sauce
Let the buttercream cheese dry and form a crust (at least an hour) so that it will better hold its shape when you add your fondant meats and veggies. Color and cut out fondant pizza toppings (this pizza cake features black olives, pepperoni, green pepper, and onions), place them on the pizza, grab a pizza box from a local pizza place to use for presentation, and you’re done.
