An Ariel Cake for My Daughter's Birthday

My little girl just turned four.

She’s old enough now that she knows what she wants and what she likes.

I’ve made character cakes for my son’s last two birthdays (and will again for his upcoming birthday). It was time to make a special cake for my daughter.

So I asked her “What kind of cake do you want?”

Her answer - “An Ariel Cake.”

What a challenge! After thinking for a few months (I always ask a few months ahead of time to give myself plenty of time to prepare) I settled down on drawing a picture on a cake rather than making a cake in the shape of the little mermaid herself.

I’m not that good of an artist, though. So I scoured the web (i.e. did a Google image search) for “ariel coloring page” and finally settled on this image:

There’s no way my clumsy self would be ever be able to get that much detail onto the cake, so I edited the image, removing much of the detail:

My initial plan was to use the paper to stencil in the parts of Ariel, so I made three paper stencils, each for non-adjacent parts:

The stencils didn’t work as good as I had hoped. Maybe instead of using standard printer paper, I should’ve use card stock or something else.

In the end, I only used the part that stenciled her human skin (the far left on in the image above) and free-handed the hair, tail, and clamshell bra.

Here’s the result:

You’ll notice that the end result has no face; I felt adding that detail would just make it look worse. Also, in the 1989 Disney cartoon, her clamshell bra is purple, where here I just made it the same color as her tail. Oh, and her human skin is just white icing - I tried to make peach, skin-colored icing, but it just turned out orange.

(If you must know, I used Pillsbury white cake with Pillsbury white icing, died with Kroger brand food coloring. I use milk instead of water, but other than that, I follow the whole-egg directions just as the box reads).

Now the important part - did my daughter like the cake? I asked her, and she said yes. My favorite part was when, at her birthday party, after I saw her admiring her cake, she turned to me and gave me a thumbs-up sign.