The Little Mermaid!

I found some very cool cake ideas online (thanks to Google) and picked out an 'Ariel underseas' type of design for my daughter's 5th Birthday party.  From the images I saw it looked like the cake was iced in a light blue tinted buttercream, but having never worked with fondant I thought I would give it a shot.

I started with my cakes... two 8 inch round chocolate cakes and two 6 inch round vanilla cakes.  I put a vanilla custard filling in between the layers of the chocolate cakes, frosted them with buttercream and covered them with the light blue fondant.  Then I repeated these steps with the vanilla cakes.  I didn't dowel the cakes at all because I'm not transporting this cake, but if you plan to transport yours I would highly recommend putting some wooden or plastic dowels in.

I learned some lessons on this cake:

• Watch your cake trimming... LOL.  When you're hoping to have the bottom cakes a little bit larger than the top layers don't trim the heck out of them!
• When working the fondant before rolling it out... keep kneading it...  I tend to get impatient, but mine could have been worked a little bit longer.  It probably would have rolled a tiny bit easier.
• When trimming the fondant... go easy.  You can always take more off the bottom, but you can't add it back on.
• Shorter nails make working with the fondant easier.  Mine are getting a little long right now and I was constantly worried that I would leave little half moon indents into the fondant.

The next steps were adding the ocean accents using tinted buttercream.  I used Wilton tip 352 to make the seaweed and the awesome part of using buttercream accents.... it allowed me to cover up any imperfections in the fondant.  I had to small tears in the fondant that I didn't have any luck trying to fix so I covered them up with the seaweed! Woot woot!

And the finished product:

I hope my daughter enjoys her Ariel undersea adventure cake as much as I enjoyed making it for her!!