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This year my oldest had a pool party birthday. She had wanted a High School Musical theme but going with the pool party theme, I managed to talk her into these invites. I found them on vistaprint.com. Once I found the invites I just kind of ran with it and decided to do a mermaid cake.

I looked at a lot of different cakes on the web, but inspiration just wasn't hitting me. After a lot of thought I decided to go big. I drew myself a little sketch and headed to Home Depot. Since I did a lot of things that I haven't done before with this cake, I took lots of pictures as I worked. I'll give you a bit of a breakdown on how I did the cake in this post.

When I got home, I pulled out the power tools.


I started by building the base for my cake supports. I built it up a little bit so that it would be easy to lift and so that the screws I put in to hold the supports wouldn't make the board uneven.

After building the base, I marked where the cakes would sit and screwed the bottoms of my supports in place. Then I took them out, covered the board in fondant and put them back in.

I started working on the tail first. 
I took the cake boards and cut holes in the middle so they fit around the pvc support. Then I filled, stacked the cakes and carved the cake. 
The tail of the mermaid was coconut with coconut cream filling.

The fin was a bit tricky, and took a bit of trial and error. I figured I would just use rice krispie treats for this part, but apparently rice krispie treats don't like to stick to plastic. I played around with it for a bit and ended up wrapping parts of the pvc in fondant and then forming the rice krispie treats to that. When I got the shape I wanted I covered the fin in fondant.

I covered tail piece in fondant before putting it in place on the cake base. Then I cut out the and applied the scales.

At this point I moved the cake from my table, where I do most of my work to my counter. When I did I noticed that something was uneven about the base. Looking underneath I found that when I reattached the piece holding the pvc support I had unscrewed the screw and it was now longer than the footings on my base.
I could have screamed, I was so frustrated.
And for some reason (maybe frustration causes stupidity?) I decided to take my drill and try and tighten up the screw. 
BAD IDEA!

The support stated to turn inside the cake and tore the fondant on the fin. I cut out more scales and managed to piece it back together.

See, not too noticeable now. 

The tail complete, I moved onto the head. Stacking and filling yellow cake with chocolate buttercream. I had once again cut holes in the boards to fit around the support. When everything was stable I carved the cake.

After icing it, I put on the fondant for the mermaid's face before putting the cake in place on the board. I waited to do the hair because I wanted it to drape into the "water".

After all the decorating was done, I thought "Where am I gonna put the candles." Not wanting to bake more cake, I formed some rice krispie treats into a ball. I covered it in 2 thick sheets of fondant, to bulk it up and to have a soft place to put the candles in.
After a steaming we were ready to make a splash at the pool party.

Here's my beautiful girl with her cake.

And the finished cake. I'm pretty proud of this one.