Last weekend was my beautiful baby girl’s 5th birthday party. She requested an Ariel cake, so this is what I came up with. Thank you to everyone who has posted Little Mermaid Cakes online and thank you to Google Image search. I borrowed from all these places mercilessly.
CAKE
The cake comes from the Buttercup Cookbook. That is probably my most consistent yellow cake recipe. I make my own “self-rising” flour by adding 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and a 1/2 teaspoon of salt for every cup of regular all-purpose flour.
This cake is easy to make, but two words of warning:
1. Do not overbake. Take the cake out of the oven as soon as its done and before it becomes a very rich brown.
2. Don’t refrigerate the cake. If refrigeration is unavoidable, leave at least 6 hours for the cake to come back to room temperature. Because of all the butter, cold cake is dry cake. The buttercream frosting will keep it fresh and moist on the inside for up to 24 hours without refrigeration.
FROSTING
I threw together a basic American vanilla buttercream a lot like this one from Gale Gand. Truthfully, I put room temperature unsalted butter in a mixer and start adding powdered sugar, cream, salt and vanilla until it looks and tastes right. But the ratios probably end up much like the Gale Gand recipe. I tend to make it on the sweet side, but when it comes to decoration, you want to also look for the right consistency.
TOPPER
The topper was ordered online.
Decoration is not my strong suit, but I was pretty happy with how this turned out.
