Chloe's 8th Birthday Mermaid Spetacular

Today is my beautiful niece, Chloe's birthday.  She is 8 years old and after much deliberation, I decided to make her a mermaid cake as she loves things to do with the sea for her birthday party on Saturday.  She also loves nearly all the cakes in my various cake decorating books and I frequently find post-it notes marking the pages with her favourites on...which is nearly all of them!

This took me about 5 and a half hours in total to do.  The trickiest bit was actually the 'sea', I mixed white and blue icing together with blue lustre dust to try and create a swirl pattern and then because the base of the board is iced as well with sand coloured icing, I had to cover the actual sponge separately and then pick it up and place it in hopefully the middle of the covered board.  Fiddly to say the least!

 I made an octopus and seashells with pearls and glittery starfish!

 The sand was created by mixing a small amount of brown icing (which is chocolate flavoured!) in with some white and then covering the board and kind of scrunching the icing up a bit towards the edges and then sticking bits on here and there.  OH kept trying to tell me that there were creases in it!!

 I got some brilliant little fish cutters which came in 3 different sizes and I used these to cut out fondant shapes and glittered them up to go on top of cupcakes which will be given out to Chloe's party guests to take home.

 I used a mixture green, blue and gold lustre dusts on the mermaids tail.

Hope she likes it!!