After fighting with elephant skin on my first fondant covered wedding cake, I think I may have a solution—rub some shortening and icing sugar together to make a paste and gently rub over the patches of skin…of course prevention would be ideal, but I was working out of desperation—it seems it’s a bit abrasive and also fills in the gaps of the wrinkles.  It doesn’t entirely eliminate the problem, but it worked better than steaming or applying shortening on it’s own.  I’ll see how it holds up!!

Thanks for sharing this.  I often have problems with “elephant skin” fondant.  I wonder why adding icing sugar to the shortening helps?  That’s something I never would have thought of trying that.

Further to this topic - I have had quite a bit of experience with Fondant covered wedding cakes, and with the desert-dry air here in S. Alberta I can relate to the elephant skin problem. However, an even more frustrating challenge for me has been - satisfactorily covering SQUARE cakes in fondant. How on earth do you get the excess fondant from going over the square corners distributed on the sides and smoothed out, without a bunch of folds and creasing??? I have tried making little “darts” in it (and patching the cuts with icing sugar), squeezing it together alog the bottom, and so forth. All with very unsatisfactory results. Any help I could get on this would be greatly appreciated!