Mermaid and Unicorn Birthday Cake

This week, I was tasked with creating a birthday cake. But not just any birthday cake-- oh no-- a magical mermaid and unicorn birthday cake!

Now, my experience with fondant is limited. And by limited, I mean, this was my first attempt at making fondant for any reason.

I had taken the day off of work already, and thank God I did, because this took hours. Maybe it's just because I'm truly a beginner, but never again will I balk at the price of a professionally made cake.

I used a few different recipes for the cake, frosting, and fondant. I wanted a bright pastel color scheme, so I used Neon Food Coloring.

• Perfect Buttercream Frosting by Chef in Training
• Milk and Cookies Cake, cake recipe only, using gluten free baking flour as a substitute, by Liv for Cake
• Marshmallow Fondant by the Bearfoot Baker

I needed about 3/4 of the whole marshmallow fondant recipe (or a little over the 1/2 batch), 2 rounds of the cake batter, and 3 batches of buttercream frosting.

You also can obviously use any cake recipe, but I just wanted to include everything so you can see exactly what I did!

The entire cake is frosted in a crumb coat.

The bottom of the cake is the "mermaid" part. It's essentially 4 different colors of fondant circles, which were made by rolling out the fondant and cutting circles using a shot glass. They were then alternated so that they overlapped slightly around the entire bottom of the cake. This section is comprised of 3, 9-inch layers.

The top of the cake is obviously the unicorn! I'm sure you have seen the cute unicorn cakes on Pinterest, so this is my take on it. 

Before frosting the layers, I placed the bottom of the top section on a cake board cut to size and layered cake and frosting. I then added a crumb coat to it, and draped the fondant. 

The cake itself is covered in white fondant, though I'm sure you can use buttercream if you wish. I just liked the smooth look of the fondant draped over the cake. 

The pieces of the unicorn are also all marshmallow fondant. I made black (well, really dark gray), fondant and cut out the cute little eyes and lashes and stuck them to the nicest side of the cake. Then I placed the cake layer on top of the bottom section, cake board included, and also propped on top of several cake dowels for support.

The ears are white fondant circles (the same as the mermaid scales) stretched slightly to make a little bit pointier shape. I rested these inside of an egg carton to give a little curved appearance, and chilled in the refrigerator for a few minutes. I then added two small pieces of pink fondant to the inside, which were small balls of fondant flattened and also stretched just a little. They are supported by small dowels (toothpicks would also likely work).

The horn was assembled by rolling four different colors of fondant into small balls. I then rolled them all out into one flat striped piece of fondant, and kneaded them a bit to get a swirl of colors. I then rolled into the horn shape. It's ok if it takes a few tries, you just want to get the shape before the colors blend together too much. I inserted a small dowel into this as well, and chilled in the fridge for a bit... otherwise it starts to droop a bit.

Once all pieces were assembled, I added a few piped buttercream touches for the mane, and to conceal the seam between tiers. The final touch was a sprinkle of edible glitter stars for a touch of magic!

I did smudge it a little bit when moving, which is why the blue buttercream in the middle is a little wonky. Oops.

All in all, I think it was a successful first attempt at a cake, and I'm really happy with it!