Little Mermaid Birthday Cake

5 from 1 vote

This Disney the Little Mermaid birthday cake is a one layer sheet cake decorated in butter icing and fondant toppers. Get the tutorial here!

Prep Time25

Cook Time50

Decorating time3

Total Time4 15

Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Servings: six inches by 10 inches rectangle cake

Calories: 4762.6kcal

Preheat oven to 170 °Celsius.
Beat butter and sugar till soft and creamy for about 2 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, and salt. Fold in the sifted ingredients into the creamed mixture alternately with milk, starting and ending with flour.
Finally, add in vanilla extract and combine well. Pour batter into a well greased and floured cake pan and bake for 45 to 50 minutes until the top of the cake springs back when lightly pressed. The cake is done when a skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out without any wet batter.
Remove the cake from oven and let it cool completely before icing and decorating.

Prepare the Sebastian and the octopus toppers for the Little Mermaid cake ahead of time. Make them both out of fondant. Add some CMC powder to the fondant before shaping these toppers to help them set firm.

Once the cake has completely cooled down, level the top and crumb coat it. This is a single layer cake, hence there is no need to fill it with buttercream.
Cover the cake with blue tinted butter icing. Butter icing is a much stiffer version of buttercream. It is stiff enough that you can take it with hand without it sticking all over.
And because of this stiff consistency, piping this icing with a piping bag is not very easy. To cover the cake with butter icing, simply take a little of the icing at a time in your fingers and flatten it directly onto the cake. In doing this, you need not smooth the icing so much. Leave the finishing rough so that the icing looks like sea waves on the cake.
To make the waves, all you need to do is use your fingertips to press on the icing and make the dents on it.

Place the cake on a large square cake board, making sure there is ample space on the front of the cake board to place the birthday girl's name.
Next, make the fondant stones for the Ariel cake topper to sit on. To make the stones, add some black coloring into white fondant. For the marbled effect, knead it by twisting both colors until the white and black are only just mixed.
Form rough balls and stack them on one another. And then place Ariel Little Mermaid figurine on the stones while they are still soft. This is so that the stones could be adjusted to hold the Little Mermaid in place.
Next, place Sebastian cake topper and the octopus cake topper on the cake. And then sprinkle brown sugar on the cake board.

For the sides of the Little Mermaid birthday cake, you can use Wilton Pattern Press Set to imprint scrolls all around the cake.
And then, cut the seagrass out of fondant. You can cut these freehand using a pizza cutter. And attach them randomly to the sides of the cake as well as the stones earlier. Since the cake is covered in butter icing, the grease would be enough to hold the grass in place. No glue is required.

Cut the words "Happy Birthday" out of fondant. Place them on the cake itself. The birthday girl's name is placed on star cutouts, on the cake board.
Next, cut out a 3D number "4" for the girl's age, poke a toothpick to it and insert it near one of the octopus's tentacles, as if the octopus is holding it to complete the cake decoration.