Mermaid Cake Tutorial

I am giving you a mermaid cake tutorial today because a mermaid party wouldn’t be complete without the perfect mermaid cake. I love decorating cakes. I find it really knits together any theme. If you haven’t seen what this party has been all about I’d love you to visit my posts about the overall theme and decor, tablescape and food ideas.

It has become a hobby that I get completely engrossed in while I am working. It’s one of those hobbies where I get so involved that I don’t even notice meal times coming and going – a miracle for me. I hope you have seen my Cake Making 101 and Cake Making 201 posts, and that they have given you some inspiration in expanding your own cake decorating skills. A cake only means so much if it looks pretty. If it doesn’t taste good then you are in trouble. That’s why I use my no-fail White Velvet Cake recipe with a fabulous Buttercream Frosting that has the right stability and taste. Once you have a great base, it is time to build on the design components. My goal, with this cake, was to mimic my paper scale wall for Abigail’s mermaid party. I worked hard to re-create the paper in fondant form. It took a little work and experimentation, but I was really happy with how it turned out. Creating a glitter or sequin look is something I had never done before. I was making it up as I went along. So, how did I do it?

The first step was to mix all the colors. I had paper samples next to my fondant so I could keep checking the colors. I started with Wilton icing colors in gel form. I started with the colors teal and sky blue and then adjusted with green, yellow or blue as needed.

The colors above were the easiest. The paper was a solid color, so it just meant rolling them out, cutting the ovals out and trimming off the tops with a pizza cutter to create the fondant fish scales. Here’s some pictures of how to do that and the tools you need:

I found the perfect cookie cutter I needed at Global Sugar Art. This online store really has all you need for your cake decorating adventures. I knew I could create the scales if I found the right size and shape for the oval. Global Sugar Art had a set of oval cookie cutters with graduating shapes, and it was perfect. Cookie cutter decorating for cakes has to be the easiest. I would just use the oval cookie cutter and then use a pizza cutter to cut off the top.

This paper had a mint green base and then looked glitter on top. I don’t know if you are familiar with rainbow edible disco dust, but that is the product I was able to apply to get the look to match the paper. With disco dust or other metallic finishes on fondant, you want to apply a bit of lemon juice of Vodka and then create a paste with the powder. I use a combination of sprinkling on the disco dust and painting it on with the lemon juice.

The final look replicated the paper well. The edible rainbow disco dust is the key.

Here are my three teal based papers with the teal fondant I mixed. To make the “glitter” look, I used green and turquoise sprinkles and a little rainbow “disco dust.”

I combined the blue and green sprinkles together to create the perfect blend.

I used a clean paint brush to apply just a tad bit of water to each scale. I sprinkled the sprinkles on top and then added a little bit of rainbow disco dust. You can see the paper on the right side I was trying to match. This was probably the most challenging one to match, but it worked really well on the cake.

Here’s another paper from the teal. It’s hard to see, but the paper had striations on it. It is even harder to see in the picture, but I was able to imprint the texture of the paper onto the fondant. I did it by flipping the paper face down on top of the fondant and then rolling over it with a rolling pin. Here’s a picture of the process:

The final paper I was attempting to replicate was the sequin turquoise color. I started off with a turquoise fondant. I then added blue pearl dust (applied with the lemon juice or Vodka), turquoise sprinkles and some rainbow disco dust to finish off the look.

Abby decided to take a break from the lake to help me with these.

Now I had a huge table of ovals and fish scales. I used my pizza cutter to go along and trim off the rest of the tops so I just had fondant fish scales ready to be applied to the cake.

Here’s the paper fish scale wall I was trying to mimic.

It is easy once you have those scales made. Abby helped with a lot of the assembly. You just need to add the fish scales, staggered as shown. I tried to make sure that like colors were not touching.

Just keep working from the base up. As you can tell from the picture above, I didn’t mind that the scales were of different lengths because the tops would be covered.

However, you can see I was a little more particular when lining up the scales at the top layer.

And there you have a mermaid cake that mimics the scales on a mermaid’s tail.