This mermaid birthday cake has to easily be one of the craziest fun cakes we’ve been asked to create so far. The inspiration behind this was little Emily’s love for a My Little Pony movie about unicorn mermaids (seriously… why didn’t this exist when we were 5?!?). Armed with images of her rainbow streaked and glitter covered party invites we had all the inspiration we needed. Our idea in the end was of a giant pink marshmallow (where else are unicorns going to live?) floating Île de Floattant style on a turquoise sea inhabited by mermaids. This possibly makes us sound insane, but sometimes it helps for us to build a small story behind the design of a cake. We think it helps add a little extra fun.
Recently the lovely The Shire Bakery sent us some pretty cool sprinkles. These included lots of metallic rods, tiny star studded mixes and a fun sea / mermaid themed bottle! We needed certain colours for this cake so we created a more custom mix out of some of our favourites! In went the sugar pearls, shimmering sea shells, giant pink confetti pieces, baby blue seahorses, pastel yellow stars and pink/rose gold metallic rods! Perfect for a mermaid birthday cake!
Nestled on top was Emily’s own magical unicorn, a huge rainbow 5 and a cloud with her name in gold! The fondant number 5 was tricky as it needed to be larger than the unicorn, hold itself up and be heavily decorated. Any added weight can make a custom fondant number or letter snap. To get around this we created the piece in advance and added a hidden support structure inside.
Unicorn and mermaid birthday cake
We do a lot of cakes topped with fondant unicorns so we try to make every single one different. Some have pink ombré hair and some sport a rainbow style. Some unicorns are star studded and some have a little added glitz! We gave this little cutie a super excited expression with a slightly upturned head, closed-tight eyes and a cheeky smile! We also dusted her with edible lustre and added rainbow stars in her wild rainbow mane.
Loving the board on this beauty! We created fondant mermaid tails with bright fondant and edible gold paint. We then surrounded these with sprinkles meringue kisses as ‘rocks’. The pretty turquoise meringues were studded with tiny gold sprinkles from Fancy Sprinkles! These added a little extra fun to the plain pink kisses with the texture and extra gold.
Also, running down the cake is a seriously so-bright-you’ll-need-sunglasses hot pink drip! We used a cocoa butter based food colouring for this as normal food colour is generally water based. We all know what happens to chocolate when a bit of water hits it… it seizes up! Yikes.
Now for a final look at this magical rainbow covered mermaid birthday cake! We loved it from start to finish. What’s not to love really… cute unicorn… mermaids… rainbows… stars… cake!
