When you need to harden fondant fast to harden it or make it stand up, you can add tylose to make it into a quick gumpaste, or you can dry it out in a few ways.
The easiest way is by using a dehydrator, but it might not work for every type of fondant shape.
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When you need to dry fondant or gumpaste quickly, can you put it in a dehydrator without melting it?
You can dry gumpaste and fondant items in a dehydrator if you take certain precautions.
Because the sugar heats up and can soften, you may need to pre-dry the sugar pieces, but if they’re placed on the tray that’s farthest from the heat source it should be fine.
Smaller pieces will work better than larger ones, with flat-backed fondant or gumpaste being the easiest to dry.
How to dry fondant and gumpaste in a dehydrator
I bought a dehydrator this week to use for gumpaste orders and tried out a few things in it to see how it would work.
The one that I got was the Oster model with four trays that seems to be the easiest one to find in stores.
Any dehydrator with trays will work, though. You can check the prices here on Amazon.
The drawback with this one is that the trays aren’t very deep, so you can’t put things that are really large in it.
I started with some bows that had been drying for a couple of days.
It’s been pretty humid here so they were dry, but not enough that I felt that they were hard enough to ship without losing their shape.
If these had been made from fondant, I probably would have put some plastic wrap inside the loops to keep them loopy if they softened up in the drying process.
Fondant needs to be treated like it will soften and lose its shape during the drying process! You can also add some stiffeners to it before modeling the items to make it dry faster. Read about that here: How to make your fondant stiffer.
I put them in the dehydrator for half an hour, then tested them.
They were really hot, which was slightly alarming, because they seemed to be softening up. I decided to take them out of the dehydrator, and I let them cool off.
Well, lo and behold, when they cooled off they were dry as a bone, and I was able to pack them up and ship them out.
So then I took a pinecone that I’d molded about a week ago, and was still soft to the touch inside.
The gumpaste had a lot of food coloring in it, and it was really soft when I was working with it.
The outside was hard, but I could tell that it would squoosh if it got pressed against something.
I put that in the top tray so that the gumpaste was farthest away from the heat source, and left it there for a few hours.In the meantime, I also cut out some wired hydrangea leaves and put those in there too.
Those were totally new, so they hadn’t dried out at all when I put them in the top tray.
After three hours I took them out and let them cool off.
They had dried fast and were totally done, and I was comfortable shipping them without worrying about them losing their shape.
The pinecone was also hard all the way through, as far as I could tell.
I could press on it pretty hard and it didn’t lose its shape or feel soft at all.
I also put some white molded flowers in it, and they hardened up nicely after a few hours too.
I decided to try some wired peony petals next, even at the risk of them heating up and losing some of their curve.
They had been drying overnight, so they were stiff but still pliable.
I filled the entire dehydrator and after an hour they were totally dry, and they hadn’t lost their shape at all.
How to harden fondant to stand up.
You can use a dehydrator for fondant pieces that need to stand up if they’re flat and you can dry them flat in the dehydrator.
Make sure that the pieces are lying flat in the dehydrator to make sure that they dry flat. To do that, use the method I mentioned above where you put some tulle netting on the rack of the dehydrator so that it supports the fondant while it dries and lets the air circulate freely around it.
If you add some tylose to the fondant before shaping it, it will harden faster and will be less likely to stay dried out when it’s done in the dehydrator.
If you stick a toothpick or skewer into the fondant piece before drying it, that will give you a pick to insert into the cake or cupcake when the fondant is dry. That can help keep the piece upright, especially if it’s thin and flat.
What to remember when you’re drying fondant and gumpaste in a dehydrator.
So the dehydrator does work, with the following things to keep in mind:
1. The base of the machine is the hottest, so put things in the top tray if possible.
2. For items that need to keep their shape you might need to put them in an aluminum foil form, which could slow the drying time down some.
3. The gumpaste will get hot and feel soft, but when it cools off it will be a lot harder than it was when you started.
4. Things that are tall might not fit unless you rig the trays up to accommodate larger items somehow.
5. The dehydrator is on the loud side, I’d say that it’s comparable to the exhaust fan on my stove.
6. The gumpaste I use is basically a fondant with tylose in it.
I don’t know how other types of gumpaste would react, although I can’t imagine that they’d act much differently.
I suspect that straight fondant would be softer and might be more affected by the heat. That will be my next experiment.
7. To prevent small items from falling through the vents in the dehydrator tray, use some tulle netting laid on top of the tray.
