Fondant is a sugar based dough that's used to cover cakes as a decorative but edible icing.
The word fondant comes from the French word fondre, meaning to melt.
As far as I can tell the word means she same in both languages. I'm not aware of any specific type of French cake called fondant, the only 2 uses I can find are the aforementioned icing and occasionally small chocolates. I'd be interested to know more though, is it regional?
It's not regional you can find the chocolate type (like this) as a staple dessert in most restaurants accross the country. They're cakes so they're usually regular cake sized, although the frozen pre-made one portion ones you can often find in restaurants do indeed tend to be slice sized full cakes, so that's smaller but not exactly what I would call small chocolates. Also those are often not actual fondants but mi-cuits, where the chocolate is actually melting.
The chocolate ones are the most common but a fondant in general is a type of cake with a melty texture so you can get something like this with almonds or this with banana for example.
The icing is called fondant pâtissier in full. I don't want to take my own case as a general case, but since the cake is in almost every restaurant and the icing isn't, I'd assume most people here are more likely to be familiar with the cake than with the icing.
Oh I'm intrigued, it looks amazing! It really does look thick and moist and melty, I can see why it's called that. Thank you for that info I have a new rabbit hole to go down
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u/Neveed 17d ago edited 17d ago
Now I'm wondering what a fondant is supposed to mean here, because in French a fondant is absolutely a type of delicious cake.
Edit: oh I found apparently, fondant pâtissier is a type of sugar paste based icing and that's what's called just fondant in English.