My little niece Rebecca is getting so big and turned 5 at the end of December! For her birthday cake this year, she asked for a Unicorn Cake for her birthday party with her friends {*tear*}. I still think of her as the baby of the bunch (she’s the youngest cousin), so it was kind of amazing to see her at her gymnastics/unicorn/princess party with her whole squad of friends!
These Unicorn Cakes are everywhere on the internet, YouTube and at fancy bakeries. I mainly followed this Rosanna Pansino tutorial, and here’s how I did it:
- Baked up this cake recipe for Funfetti Cake, leaving out the almond extract, in three 6″ cake pans instead of two 8″ cake pans. This cake recipe is perfect because the layers bake up nice and tall. You want the unicorn to be taller than it is wide, so it’s important to use 6″ cake pans. Pro tip: toss the sprinkles in a bit of flour before stirring them into the batter so they don’t bleed.
- Made a batch and a half of My Favourite Buttercream, using white icing to stack up the layers, added a crumb coat, and then put on a final finishing layer.
- Dyed the remaining icing pink, turquoise, light purple and dark purple. I planned out in advance which colours I wanted most of (pink and light purple) for the rosettes, so made more of those colours in proportion to the colours I just needed for the little starbursts and kisses. I followed the video to get the front of the cake right, and then just freestyled it across the top of the cake and down the back/side for the mane.
- Now, the fondant, which I am normally against, but was obviously essential here. Bulk Barn is now selling small packages of fondant (a bit bigger than say a deck of cards), so that was great. One package was just enough for the horn and ears. Again, I followed the video so won’t repeat that here, except to say it was easier than I thought. For the horn, you just wrap a tapered tube of fondant around a candy stick. For the ears, she uses a cookie cutter, but I just shaped them by hand and stuck toothpicks in them.
- Mixed gold pearl dust with vodka and painted the whole horn and the inside of the ears. I let this dry overnight and added a second coat in the morning. Her gold is way more concentrated in the video, while mine was kind of sheer. I didn’t think a group of 5 year olds would mind.
- Honestly the hardest part about this whole thing was the eyes. I tried to freehand it and messed it up, so I ended up taking a roll of washi tape and lightly pressing semi-circle indents into the cake. That made it easier to trace/fill in with my navy icing, and then the eyelashes were no problem after that.
Rebecca’s previous birthday cakes:
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