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Updated on December 7, 2021 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Mermaid Queen Timelapse

Skill level: Newb
Watch Liz create this award-winning cake sculpture called the "Mermaid Queen" created for NCACS and placed 1st in her division.

This cake was a labor of love. My love for all things mermaid. I am obsessed with finicky little details like shells and coral crowns (made of simicakes isomalt of course). I spent forever making molds from beads and shells to create her neck piece and I broke my pasta machine making her hair. The scariest part was putting her in a box and taking her on a plane all the way from Oregon to Virginia for the cake show. Her hair suffered a little breakage but nothing too bad. She still got First Place. The only bummer was I could not bring her home wahhhhh.

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About Liz Marek

Liz Marek is a professional cake artist and recipe developer who has been teaching baking and cake decorating since 2008. She founded Artisan Cake Company in Portland, Oregon in 2009 and now runs Sugar Geek Show, where she publishes kitchen-tested recipes, food science explanations, and step-by-step tutorials.

Liz is best known for sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes. She won Netflix's Is It Cake? Holiday 2 in 2025 with a hyperrealistic Santa cake, and has competed on and won Food Network cake competitions. Cake Masters Magazine named her one of the top 10 cake artists in 2017. She is the author of Artisan Cake Company's Visual Guide to Cake Decorating and a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute.

Her focus is on explaining not just how a recipe works but why it works, so bakers can troubleshoot instead of guess. Every recipe on this site is tested before it's published.

Liz teaches full-length cake tutorials, including sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes, at Sugar Geek University.