Mermaid Wedding Cake

In my pastry class, we just finished our wedding cake project. My instructor had us practicing our royal icing piping for weeks before this project. Then during our 3-day prep time, he showed us how to make gum paste and rolling fondant. He showed us how to cover our cakes (delicious, styrofoam cakes) with the fondant, and how to make flowers out of gum paste. Then he basically set us to work, with three days to complete our cakes.

A quick run-down on the details:
- 3 tiers, all must be covered in fondant (white fondant only)
- at least 2 kinds of piping
- at least 1 kind of flower
- everything except the flower wiring and pistil/stamens must be edible (which is amusing, since we were working on foam molds :P)

Of course, I didn't want to do some boring wedding cake. I'm not into wedding cakes at all, and most of the piping techniques (extension work?!) he showed us were boring, or not my style at all. So, naturally, I went with a mermaid theme!

First off, I am extremely pleased with the colors for my seaweed. They are better than I could have hoped for, and using two different sized leaf tips gave a great effect! The white swirly, bubbly piping on the top 2 tiers was purely improv. I knew I needed another type of piping and I didn't want any more color (aside from the flowers), so I went with white. Again, I'm really happy with the results.

My shining star (pun intended) actually turned out to be my little starfish! I wasn't really sure about the color, or how I was going to make it, and when I first began piping it, I was getting disappointed. I practiced first, but didn't think about the angle it was on, and some of the icing started drooping down. But luckily, it gave the starfish a more organic feel, and I had a lot of fun piping all the little white dots on top!

As a fun little play on words, I decided to go with anemones for flowers. I would have LOVED to make anemone sea creatures, but it really didn't seem plausible with gum paste. So I went with some pretty blue anemone flowers, and a few red ones for a nice accent color. I also made a cute little pearl, just as a little something extra.

This project was a LOT more fun than I was expecting, and I think I am overall, the most pleased with my cake out of all the girls in my class. I really wish my flowers were a LOT better, but they were the best I could do, and for my first time making gum paste flowers, I think they're not half bad. Of course, this wasn't a traditional looking wedding cake, and my instructor didn't say much to me after the first night when he helped me do my fondant and work some of my flower middles. So who knows what kind of grade I'll actually get!