Mermaid cake

A launch party for Poems Underwater on a boat needed a cake, and mermaids were heavily involved -- commissions don't come much more enticing than that. My last mermaid was a medieval one, and I wanted to stick to the theme, but wanted to do a Melusine -- a double tailed mermaid. Her story's different wherever you read it, but her two tails are usually a punishment for seeking revenge against her father, on her mother's behalf. But her mother is enraged with Melusine for her lack of respect, so curses her to swapping her legs for two serpentine coils every Saturday; when Melusine marries, she makes her new husband promise never to enter her chamber on that day. When he breaks his promise and walks in on her soaking in a green marble tub, she turns into a dragon and flies away, leaving only two magical rings and quickly cooling bathwater behind.

This myth is woven into geneology, part of the ancestry myth of several European noble families, notably the French royal family the Lusignans; Melusine is sometimes cast as a princess, who builds her husband a castle with her magic powers. This association has meant that the double tailed Melusine image pops up in heraldic imagery, as it does in this 1586 engraving.

I loved the idea of putting the tub into the design, of showing Melusine relaxed and serenely decorative, before she turns to serpentine fury. And using the shield seemed like a golden opportunity to reference Poems Underwater -- in suitable medieval, sinuous script of course. 

I drew up a quick idea, then while the sponges were in the oven -- I just baked two plain rectangles, ready for carving up later -- I had a brainwave, and remembered my Grandma's set of letter shape cutters. They were just the right size to use to cut the words out of fondant, and with a bit of tweaking and trimming the letters easily transformed to suit my typographical ends.

The actual shaping the sponge part is always brutal and messy -- I always want to use as little icing as possible, so it's an odd kind of geometry arranging the cake into the right kind of 3D shape, ready for draping with fondant. 

You can just about see the construction here -- a fairy cake dewrappered for the head, and then odd slices of cake for the rest, filled with jam and buttercream. 

And then the icing goes on, and it's all serene. The colours are painted on, watercolour style, with food colouring, and I dusted everything with ample blue and gold edible glitter. Because she's magic.

I especially liked how the tub came out...I was trying to make it look like green marble, like in the story.

I brought her head home for breakfast the next day, when both of use were a bit worse for the wear. She was still sparkly, though.