How to make a mermaid cake

My little baby turned 3 on Monday, I can't believe time has gone by so fast. When I asked her what she wanted for her birthday cake, she said a Barbie, mermaid, princess, ballerina, fairy cake. I decided to narrow that down to just mermaid - well Barbie mermaid.

I had great ideas of making a mermaid by molding it out of rice crispy cake - you know it looks so easy on tv - but then I thought better and decided to just buy a mermaid Barbie. This way it's a cake topper and present in one. To ice the cake I took inspiration from the movie Mermaidia - a Barbie movie the girls have watched too many times.

I started by making 2 round cakes, I made them rainbow by separating the batter in 3 and adding food colouring to each and then pouring them in the cake pans. I also made another batch of cake and cooked part of it in my Pampered Chef big mixing bowl and made cupcakes with the rest. The cake from the mixing bowl made the rock for the mermaid to sit on.

Before icing it all I leveled the cakes off and made sure the Barbie could sit on it.
I then iced the round cakes. I iced it in blue icing and then mixed up a darker and lighter blue and swirled it around look like water.

I iced the rock on a separate board with wax paper underneath so I could lift it on the blue cake. I made a purply grey icing for the rock and added some sugar crystals on top to make it sparkle. If you make something like this don't make the rock black - I saw some online that made their rocks black and it looks like the poor mermaid is stuck in tar.
Then I plopped the iced rock on top of the water. I piped some blue icing around the rock and pulled it up on the rock to look like waves. I had some blue tinted sugar that I sprinkled on top to make the water shimmer.

I think it turned out pretty good and more importantly I think Isla liked it.