Little Mermaid Cake

Before I had my little Nora, my nieces were my only little loves. Being that I LOVE to bake cupcakes and cakes – I was honored when, for the second time, my also creative sister-in-law was allowing me to make the prized Birthday cake for my first niece, Madalyn. What kind of cake did she want, you ask? Why an Ariel cake, of course.

One thing I will tell you is that when baking – always start with a ‘vision’ or idea of what you want – but just let the cake become what it wants as you go. Things NEVER go as planned for me but they always turn out ok. It’s like a canvas – you can put another layer on top to cover mistakes.

I started making this cake knowing I wanted to use a doll dress shape with an Ariel doll inside. So, while I was at Disney I picked up an Ariel doll to use in the middle and borrowed the doll dress cake pan that was used for so many of my Birthday cakes growing up (like this one). I am a ‘semi-homemade’ cake baker in most cases. To me that means that icing/frosting should ALWAYS be homemade but I usually start from a boxed cake mix and just ‘liven’ the batter up a bit. Typically, I add an extra egg and replace

the oil with melted butter in all cake mixes. Sometimes I add other things to it but in this cake that’s all I did. Madalyn likes standard white/yellow cakes so I didn’t stray too far with flavors.

I will tell you – that once I started the cake – the first bump in the road that I found was that the doll dress cake pan is NOT made for dolls the height of the Disney doll I got. So – I had to quickly whip up another round cake to set under the dress shaped cake so that it was tall enough to stick the doll all the way down into.

After the cakes were baked it was time to start icing them. I started by making a bunch of buttercream. I love the recipe from Wilton but instead of all vanilla, I usually do half vanilla and half almond flavoring. And I just add sifted powdered sugar until the icing doesn’t have an oily feeling aftertaste, so I don’t always follow the powdered sugar and milk amounts to a T.

I took a cup or so of frosting out for each color I wanted to do…I made some green, yellow, coral, kept a small amount white, and then the rest of the frosting I made blue. I frosted between my cake layer and dress shaped cake layer and did the entire crumb coating with the blue. Then I let it sit in the freezer for a few minutes. After that, I stuck my Ariel doll in (after taking off her fabric fin) and piped on a base coat of blue using one of my favorite decorating tools, the Wilton Icer Tip. This tip will make your life so much easier, especially if you don’t have time to do a crumb coat and freeze it. Then, I found this plastic texture thing I have (similar to these) and just ‘smoothed’ out the icing while doing a wave shape around the entire cake.

Now it’s time for the fun part, decorating!When decorating a cake – just

remember – it will NEVER look perfect to you but everyone that sees it will think it’s amazing. I always just go with the flaws and know that I can cover them up if I need to. I originally wanted to do Flounder and Sebastian out of fondant to stick on the cake. I will tell you I ended up scrapping the idea due to time and simply piped a Flounder onto the cake. (I scrapped Sebastian altogether because making pure red frosting is one of the hardest things on the planet! Red often comes out pink.)

As you can see, I played around with the tips to get some different textures and make it look like she was ‘under the sea.’ I would just add a tip then grab a piece of wax paper and test out what it would look like if I used that tip.

I started with Ariel’s fin. I found the ‘worst’ looking side and put that to the back, then I took a toothpick and lightly made an outline of a fin on the blue frosting. Then I took the green icing in a piping bag and made what I thought looked a little bit like scales. I used a tip coupler so I could change out the tip and put on a big circle tip to make the waist around the top of the cake so that there wasn’t 

a weird gap at the top. Then, I took that same green frosting and put on another tip to make some seaweed at the bottom.

I took the yellow and coral to pipe on some fun ‘under the sea’ looking plants. This was the best way for me to cover some of my not-so-pretty areas of the blue. The good thing with a cake them like this one was it didn’t have to be uniform. Once I felt like I had gotten this part pretty right, it was time to attempt Flounder. I took the same yellow and changed the tip out to a small circle tip and made the shape. I took some of the

leftover light blue and added some darker blue gel coloring to the frosting to make the fins for flounder. For

the eyes I used two spots of white frosting then poked a dot of black food coloring with a toothpick. I used that same toothpick to sketch out his nose/mouth area as well as his eyebrows and used another toothpick with some red food coloring to color in his mouth. He turned out better than I expected! Again – not perfect – but everyone else was amazed.

The last step was the bottom border. It just looked a little sloppy at the bottom so I took some of the light blue frosting, added some purple to it, and did a 

double row of little circles piped on using the same tip I used for the scales on the fin.

Now for the tricky part – transporting it! Luckily Ariel held her own hair up so I didn’t have to worry about that…but we had to drive a little over an hour to get to the party. Luckily, Dan is a good driver. We avoided as many bumps as we could and somehow magically made it to the party in one piece.

My niece Madalyn was so excited about the Ariel cake and that she was able to keep

the doll too

. Being able to do something like this for her was probably more special to me, but seeing her face was something I’ll never forget.

Onto the next baking challenge – anyone have any ideas as to what I can make for my daughter’s first Birthday cake?