Little Mermaid Cake!

So I wanted to make an amazing mermaid cake for my daughter’s 4th birthday. The absolute best being a Little Mermaid cake of course.

These are the steps I took to create this little mermaid birthday cake:

Step 1. Find Your Inspiration

Scour the web for Mermaid Cake Ideas

I absolutely loved this Arial Cake but I had done a tiered cake for my daughter the previous year. And wanted to try a different type of mermaid cake.

Little mermaid cake inspiration

While looking for mermaid and Ariel posters to print and hang for the party (see this post), my sister and I found this image of Ariel. And I thought – I can make a mermaid cake like that – I can make the entire cake an Ariel cake!!!
Little mermaid poster under the sea

Step 2. Figure out how to Make this Ariel Cake

In our house, we call this stage “Thinkineering”

Now how in the world!?!?

I took the pans I currently owned and kind of figured out what size I could make out of these pans.

I went to the cake store and bought a standard sheet cake board for Ariel cake to sit on and one very thick board for her mermaid tail.

Because I knew it had to be strong.

Here is a picture of the board as her tail before I covered it with buttercream and fondant. mermaid cake body first crumb coat

Her tail was the only non-edible part.

And you just have to find the best guess for the actual size of the tail to the size of your cake. I actually started with a poster board cutting out different size tails to see how big I wanted the cake. Then I cut the thick cake board to that size.

The tail came first. It sets the proportions for the entire Ariel mermaid cake!

Step 3. Figure Out the Tail

Ohhhh falling tail problems…Getting the tail to stay up… That was quite a problem.

I slit the cardboard where I wanted Ariel’s cake tail to “bend at the knees” and thought that would be enough to hold the cake up.

It WAS NOT!

The tail kept sinking towards what would be Ariel’s butt. So to solve this problem I made a cardboard triangle out of the leftover gold cake board and stuck it in the bend of the ‘knee’. mermaid tail construction for cake

Step 4. Baking the Cakes

Now that the tail looked like it would support fondant… On to the cakes!

I always bake my cakes from scratch, not from a box… the box cakes are deliciously light and fluffy but there is no way they would hold up to the amount of fondant it would take to make Ariel into a beautiful mermaid cake.

The cakes I baked:

One big square 16’’ by 16’’ (which I cut in half and stacked for the base of the body)

A bunch of 9 inch rounds to stack for Ariel’s butt and her body.

Freeze, freeze, freeze. I pulled my cakes out of the freezer.

Step 5. Shape the Mermaid Cake Body

I laid out the cakes and began stacking and sculpting them into shape on the cake cardboard and mermaid tail.

mermaid cake body in fridge

I also stuck a really big stick down Ariel’s torso because I thought this would be strong enough to hold a gigantic Ariel rice crispy head.

Step 6. Making the Head and Hair

For her hair and head, I made a big ball of rice krispies… hoping it wouldn’t fall… Then back in the fridge! sculpting little mermaid cake hair and head sculpting the little mermaid cake head