Okay, this Super Mario cake was SO fun to make and really brought the birthday party theme to life!
I used several different decorating techniques which I will break down throughout this post. The cake itself was a FUNfetti cake to keep it super fun inside and out – because who doesn’t love a FUNfetti cake??
FUNfetti cake
It’s in the name, FUNfetti cakes are so fun!! It’s delicious, moist, sweet and makes everyone feel like a kid again with the colorful sprinkles throughout.
This was for a kids birthday party this time, but a FUNfetti cake is the perfect surprise inside ANY cake!
Ingredients you’ll need for the cake
- All-purpose flour
- Baking powder
- Baking soda
- Salt
- Unsalted butter
- Sugar
- Sour cream
- Eggs
- Egg whites
- Whole milk
- Vanilla extract
- Jimmies sprinkles
Decorating Super Mario cake
I used several decorating methods on this cake which really gave it life and dimension. You could definitely simplify it by only doing some of the decorating techniques, but let’s talk through each of them so you can decide for yourself.
After the crumb coating, I did two tone buttercream to cover the cake – green on the bottom half and blue on the top half.
Split your remaining buttercream in half, but reserve about a cup and leave it white for the finishing touches and set that aside. Using gel food coloring, color half blue and the other half green. Mix in the amount of food coloring until you reach your desired shade.
Using a piping bag, pipe the green around the bottom to about half way up the side of the cake. Use your cake scraper to smooth it out slightly – it doesn’t have to be perfect yet. Using a new piping bag, pipe the blue above the green and on top of the cake. Using your cake scraper and an offset spatula finish smoothing the sides and top of the cake.
Next, add your rainbow road using sprinkles. Use your spatula or cake scraper to mark little lines where you want the road so you can just place the sprinkles inside the markings.
Using the white frosting that I set aside earlier, I added a simple pearl dot border around the bottom of the cake and finished it off with some fondant decals and Mario cake toppers.
Fondant
As of right now, fondant is not my strong suit haha I did make some and made the clouds with that batch but wasn’t entirely happy with the texture I was getting so I used Wilton store bought fondant for the rest and colored it myself.
Fondant is actually fairly easy to make, it’s just quicker to buy and I was on a time crunch haha.
American Buttercream
Classic American buttercream was the perfect icing for this cake, it’s sweet, buttery and is great for decorating details!
Check out my full post on American buttercream to get all the details you need to recreate it.
Super Mario cake sprinkle road
The sprinkle road was a must for the Super Mario theme cake.
If your frosting is soft and sticky you should be able to just press the sprinkles into the icing where you want them. Mine was a little chilled when I wanted to apply the sprinkles so they weren’t sticking very well at first. I took a tiny bit of water to wet the buttercream and then applied the sprinkles and they stuck great! Just dip your finger in water and apply it that way, so you don’t apply too much.