I'm going to be showing you how to make this absolutely stunning little mermaid cake using

your giant cupcake mold. If you don't happen to have a giant cupcake

mold, never fear, you can use regular cake carved to shape or you can use a Dolly Varden

tin to achieve the same shape for the cake that I'm going to be showing you how to make

today. To complete this cake, you're going to need:

Your Ariel doll, and try to get one wearing a plastic bikini, not a fabric upper half.

I've also got a circle cutter which I'll leave dimensions to in the description box below.

And a small size piping tip. A little bit of white shimmer and some plain

water. I've got an ice cake board. I iced mine blue

to match the cake and I've got a tutorial which shows you how to ice a cake board on

my channel which I'll link to in the description box below.

I've got some fondant in green, a caramel brown and then a teal color.

A serrated edge knife. A sharp knife.

And an offset spatula. I've got a large bread knife.

I've got some cookie crumbs, any white cookie will do, just crashed.

A little bit of our perfectly pipeable buttercream frosting in blue and white which I will also

link to the recipe for in the description box below.

I've got my giant cupcake. And if you've not baked one of these, I do have a Giant Cupcake

Basics Series which I will also link to in the description box below, and that shows

you how to bake and extract your giant cupcake so it's sitting here like this ready for you

to decorate. I've got a fondant rolling pin.

A pair of scissors. And just a couple of paintbrushes.

I've also got a little bit of corn flour just in a corn flour shaker for preparing our surface

for fondant. And I've got some of my fondant sea creatures.

Now I've just made these for Fondant Friday so there's a whole tutorial which shows you

how to make all of these little sea creature details. They're a bit of an optional extra

for this cake. So let's get started.

The first thing that you want to do is you want to take the base of your giant cupcake

and turn it upside down, and you want to just trim off as little as you possible can to

give a bit of flat bottom because you want to keep much height to this cake as possible.

Then using your bread knife, you just want to cut that base in half so that you've got

2 nice, even halves. You want to just position the top on top. And then you want, once again,

taking as little as you need to do to give it a flat base, just carve off a little tiny

bit so that you've got a nice flat fit between the two halves.

Take your smallest serrated edge knife, and holding the top half on the bottom half, you

just want to carve around the edges so that the join in between the two is about the same

size, and you're carving it into that classic kind of a Dolly Varden shape.

Hold your little Ariel up every now and again just to make sure you've got the right sort

of a size height for your cake so you know roughly how much frosting to add in the middle.

I'm really happy with the sizing, so once again, I'm just tripping off any excess to

give it a really nice neat shape. So you should have 3 sections.

You want to start with your bottom section and just spoon on a little bit of that perfectly

pipeable buttercream frosting. You just want to give this a really nice sort of a coating

in between each layer. Now you want to take your circle cutter. With

your circle cutter, just push it in. Often I find just pushing it in and just twisting

it is enough to release that cake from the inside. But if you find your cake is not going

to come, pull the circle cutter out and then just use your serrated knife to just kind

of dig in and help you lift up that core of cake. You want to make sure that you don't

cut all the way through the base of that cake. You do want the very very bottom layer of

your cake to still be cake and you don't want Ariel's feet touching the cake board. You

want it to be about nesting in cake. Give the inside of that circle a little coat of

buttercream frosting so that your cake doesn't dry up. And then you want to core out your

middle section. This one is probably the easiest, you just pop in the circle cutter and pop

out the core of cake. It's really really easy one to core.

Stick that second layer nice and evenly on top, and once again give the inside a coat

of that buttercream frosting to stop it drying out.

For the top half, this is your most fragile half. Core the top section of it out but it's

going to be a little bit bigger than our other ones. So you're going to need to use your

serrated edge knife to just go around the same shape as that circle cutter and take

out the rest because it's quite a high layer. A little bit more buttercream frosting on

the top of that second tier or second layer of your cake, and you can position your top

layer on top. That's the basic shape. So I'm going to hold

her up and just pop her inside. And you can see here when I hold this knife to her, my

cake comes up to about the bottom of her bikini line. That's about where you want your cake

height to sit before you add any of your detail. Take your caramel-colored fondant and a little

bit of corn flour, and just roll that fondant out into a nice thin relatively large piece.

I'm just going to hold that over the top of my cake to make sure I'm happy that it's going

to cover the top sort of 2/3 of the cake. And then I'm going to use my knife to cut

a really rough circle. A pizza cutter is actually a better tool for this because it gives you

a smoother cut but I'm just going to use a knife today because it's what I've got handy.

So once your fondant circle is rolled out, take that buttercream frosting and you want

to apply a thin crumb boat to the outside of your giant cupcake, just to the top 2 layers.

The reason that I'm doing this after I've rolled out that fondant is because I want

that buttercream to be really really fresh and still sticky so that our fondant got something

to stick on to. Don't forget to put frosting on the inside of that little hole where our

Ariel doll is going to be sitting. So now that I've got a nice crumb coat, I'm

going lift up that piece of fondant and I'm just going to lay it directly over the top.

With this, you now want to smooth it out but don't be too fussy because this is supposed

to be a rock and rocks are not completely smooth. So you can see here with these little

pleats, I'm just lifting them out and then smoothing them down. So just take the pleats,

sort of lift it out, smooth it down. And you really want to make sure any wrinkles that

you have are closer to the bottom half of the cupcake rather than the top because we

are going to be able to disguise those. Now I'm using my fingers just to sort of carve

some little ridges into our rock to bring it to life as a rock and stop it looking so

much like a cake, so really I'm just using my little finger and my second little finger

and I'm just carving around the edges, carving around the top so you can see, just sort of

putting some ridges and divots in. I'm going to take my sharp knife and I'm just

going to cut around the edges. Don't be worried about wrinkles but if you've got any big sort

of chunky bits of overhang of fondant, just cut them away because we don't want to have

to use a huge amount of blue frosting to cover those little imperfections up.

Taking your blue frosting, now you want to crumb coat the very bottom layer of your giant

cupcake. You shouldn't actually get very many crumbs at all in this coat because when you

bake in a silicone giant cupcake case, it actually seals the cake really nicely on the

side. Once you're happy you've got a good basic crumb coat, you want to make sure that

you're bringing that frosting right up over the join so you can no longer see where the

join of your caramel fondant meets the bottom half of your cupcake.

It's time to move the cupcake on to the board. So you want to take a little bit of blue frosting

and that's just going to act like a bit of a glue to stick our cupcake in place. And

then you want to use your offset spatula, just slide it directly underneath the cake

and then you want to pop your 2 hands underneath and just carefully pick up your cake. Now

stick it on the board and straight away drop it. Get your hands out of the way because

they're going to be covered in blue frosting and you really want to tidy up before you

go risking touching any of your cake and getting frosting everywhere.

So now our cake is looking like this, we want to start filling in a bit of a gap. You'll

have a gap between the base of the cake and the cake board, so just fill that in with

a bit of that frosting and make sure that you've got absolutely no gap. Once you're

happy that you've filled the gap, you can see I'm just moving my offset spatula back

and forward, and back and forward which is just giving it a little bit of a wavy effect

and just adding a bit of a wave texture to the blue which actually resembles our ocean.

Once you've got your sort of ocean effect in the bottom half of your giant cupcake coated,

I'm going to bring the frosting down on to the board and this really brings the board

and the cake together and it makes your cake board part of the cake rather than just a

cake sitting on a board. It actually becomes one with the cake. So I'm just smearing down

little offset spatula blobs of that frosting. And then I'm going to take some of those shortbread

crumbs or biscuit crumbs and I'm just going to put 3 or 4 little handfuls just around

the outside of the cake to kind of look like the sandy base of the ocean floor, once again

adding to the 3-dimensional effect of our cake.

To make Ariel's tail, you want to roll out your teal fondant in a bit of a shape that's

fatter at one end and thinner at the other. This is going to make the mermaid tail and

the one thing you want to remember with this is it has to be at least the length of her

body. A little bit longer is actually better. Nothing worse than a short stumpy tail. Position

it on the cake to make sure it's actually going to fit on your cake and use your hand

to smooth it down so that it's kind of flat-ish on front but still 3-dimension. You can see

here, it's actually just under her bikini line so it's quite a bit longer. I'm just

going to make sure that I'm flattening it off and that I'm keeping the taper of the

end of that tail really nice and sharp because you don't want that to get too fat.

To add in Ariel, you want to just take your sharp knife and just cut a slit in that fondant

and add her in toes first so you don't rip any of that fondant. You keep that really

nice rock surface. Now you want to cut just the top section, a centimeter or so, off that

tail because we're going to use that to cover the back of her bottom and you want to just

position that tail nice and close up with her waistline.

So you're happy that the length of your tail is fine, we want to add the scaly detail,

which is where our small piping tip comes in. And if you don't have a small piping tip,

you can also use a pen lid or something like that to get the same effect. Make sure that

you're getting the sides of the tail, as well as the fronts when you're adding that detail

in. Now you want to take a little bit of water

and you're just going to paint the back of it with just a little bit of water, pop it

right up against her waist, and bring it down on the cake. I found it looked best off a

little bit of an angle rather than straight up and down. So you can see there, I'm just

curling the tail a little bit and that's now stuck on just using a little bit of water.

Use your fingers just to make sure it's really nice and flushed and tapered up against her

hip. Now you want to take a little bit more of

that green fondant and you just want to roll it, kind of use your fingers to roll it the

center of the little snake or sausage because you do want to have 2 fatter ends on this

particular snake. Make sure that it's long enough to go around. But this is essentially,

I guess, the top of her mermaid tail where her waist and the tail actually meet. So I'm

happy that that's going to stick without using any water but if your fondant is not quite

as sticky as mine, you can use just a little bit of water to attach it.

Take another little section of fondant and just roll it out and this is just going to

be to cover her bikini bottom. So once again, I'm happy mine is going to stick without water

but you can use water if you'd like something to stick it on with, and then just use your

sharp knife just to press that fondant right down into that rock so that it's really reallly

nice and flush. Trim off any edges and just make sure that

you're getting it as seamlessly integrated into her tail as possible. Roll another little

sausage or a snake out of that caramel-colored fondant and you just want to check it for

size. Once you're happy that it's going to go nicely around her bottom, add a little

bit of water on the back and we're just going to use that to stick on. We're just really

going to kind of bring the rock and the mermaid together and it just adds a little bit more

detail but it also just combines the two a little bit better.

Now I look at my mermaid here and I decided she's a little bit skinny on the hips so I

just rolled 2 little teardrop shapes and just added them on to the tips because once I've

added on those extra details, the top of her mermaid tail was just a touch skinny. To integrate

those properly, I'm going to use my piping tip again and just add on some of those little

scales and that's just going to give her kind of a bit more of a bit defined mermaid bottom

shapes sitting on the rock. Take some of your lighter green fondant and

roll it out really really nice and thin for our tail, and then I'm just use my sharp knife

to cut out my tail shape all in one piece. So I'm just free handing this. This piece

of fondant will be quite flimsy because it is really thin so just make sure that you're

supporting it with your hands. And if you rip one or two of them, don't worry, you might

just need to have a couple of go's at this. Make sure that you neaten off your sides and

your edges with a knife or with your finger so you don't have any raggedy edges there.

And then you want to use the back of that knife, not the front of the knife just to

add in some sort of light line details to give that tail a little bit of texture.

I'm just using my knife here just to russ up that buttercream frosting because it's

been sitting for 10 minutes or so and it would have formed a crust. By using the knife, it

just helps it to regain its stick. A little bit of water on the top section of the back