Ruby’s 3rd Birthday Strawberry Mermaid Cake

This cake was many months in the planning. Despite that, it was thrown together very last minute and not at all what I had envisaged! It began with scouring cake books for months, including the infamous Womens Weekly Childrens Cake Book (now Vintage Edition!), plus some cake books from mum and from the library. In the end, Ruby wanted a mermaid cake. When asked which flavour, she said strawberry. So there was my brief!

I spent awhile looking at options for the actual decorations, finally deciding to order chocolate silicon moulds with a mermaid tail and seashells. The idea was to use the mermaid tail and a barbie upper body, but that didn’t quite eventuate! I was trying to decide what to make fill the moulds with, chocolate seeming like the most obvious answer, but on a few trials with cacao butter and honey, that it takes some technique and tempering which just all seemed too hard. I was thinking of making a gummy but decided on marshmallow. I use Jo Whitton’s recipe from Quirky Cooking (https://quirkycooking.com.au/2017/03/easy-marshmallows-honey-sweetened-natural/). I’ve made this a few times, using about 100-150g honey instead and it’s always worked. It was probably too thick of a consistency to flow into the moulds properly, it was more stuffed in, but the result was good enough!

My next issue was how to colour everything, wanting to use natural colouring. Beetroot powder seemed easy for pink, but blue was trickier, and purple was a must. I ended up finding these beautiful powders called Stardust and a local stockist. The blue one was called immunity and includes spirulina, butterfly pea, ginger and elderberry. The red/pink one is called Longevity with beetroot powder, pomegranate, strawberry, acai and blueberry. I’m so happy with finding these and how well they worked. I used these for the marshmallow and for the purple icing on the cake.

For the cake itself, I found a whole food recipe for strawberry cake, this is the one I used. (https://thehealthierbite.com/strawberry-almond-flour-cake/). Last minute I decided that I needed more cake to make it higher and used another Jo Whitton recipe for lemon cake (https://quirkycooking.com.au/2018/05/lemon-yoghurt-cake-grain-free/). I only made half a recipe for the lemon cake and didn’t make the syrup. This was such a good recipe, and loved by everyone so much, I will be making it again, full recipe with syrup!

I made the marshmallow and strawberry puree the day before. The marshmallow was probably a bit too thick to get into the moulds well, but it worked out well enough!

It was a bit rushed and chaotic that day of Ruby’s birthday trying to make the cakes and deciding to add the lemon cake last minute. I didn’t realise how long it would take to cook and cool, but so worth it!

In the end, I decided on a standard buttercream icing, just because it was easy! I used a recipe from Sheridan Joy Austin, just butter, vanilla and 1/2 cup granulated sugar. I used a raw organic sugar and whizzed it in the Nutribullet. I just coloured it with the Stardust powders. Safe to say it was very well received, but both Ruby and Louis.

So the construction, which ended up being not planned and just thrown together with a very eager and impatient 3 year old hurrying me along! Three layers of cake, strawberry almond top and bottom with lemon in the middle. I used the plain buttercream with some lemon zest and juice (from our own tree, very exciting!), between 1 layer, and just mixed some left over strawberry puree into buttercream for the other layer. The puree looked a little curdled but it was just to glue layers together and tasted amazing. I did a very rough crumb coat of purple buttercream, then just threw the rest of the bits on! I used a skewer through the mermaid tail to make it stand up and some strawberries, icing and the marshmallow shapes to fill the gaps. This was the result, a purple, strawberry mermaid cake. It tasted amazing and Ruby was pretty excited, so I’m calling it a win!