Harley Quinn Cake (Suicide Squad Cake)

Today I am showing you how to make a Harley Quinn cake! Harley Quinn is a prominent figure in the Suicide Squad movie and after all the requests to make a Harley Quinn cake, I knew I had to decorate an amazing cake to justify Harley’s unique personality.

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When I first heard people request that I make a Suicide Squad cake for the channel, I thought they were nuts! “That is not something that should be made into a cake,” was one of my initial thoughts. And then I learned it was a movie with comic book characters. Whoops. So I watched the movie, and knew that I had to make a Harley Quinn cake . . . or a Joker cake. But, really Harley Quinn steals the show (which is probably why she is getting a spin-off movie.) so I settled on her for the design. Key to her character is bubble gum blowing and her bat, so incorporating those two elements was key to the design. There’s a scene in the movie where the Joker and Harley are in a vat of acid and when he pulls her up out of it, the blue and red swirl around them like a pink and blue whirlpool. That is the exact look I was going for for the inside of the cake! To get this effect you simply have to color your cake batter and marble them in your cake pan. Super easy and super dramatic.

The pink and blue are more prominent to Harley’s character in the movie, rather than her traditional red and black from the comic books. I thought it went perfectly with the bubble gum too! I tried a couple of different ways of capturing Harley mid bubble blow, but the small gum ball was what looked the best. If you chose to make a mini gelatin bubble, that would work too. You can find the tutorial for making gelatin in my Inside Out Cake I made a while ago.

A new discovery I found while working on this cake was how good the Americolor Gourmet Writer Food Decorator Pens are. Previous to getting them earlier in the week, I had been using ones with more of a blunt tip and never really wanted to use them. The Americolor ones have a fine point, and write more easily than the other ones did. You can get them on Amazon here. I wasn’t sponsored to say that by the way. I just loved them that much! It made such a difference. Choosing how to letter the bat was hard enough. It was also super stressful to get the letters perfectly on the fondant bat. It takes a long time for the fondant to solidify so I didn’t want to have to start over. To speed up drying/hardening time, you can use a mixture of fondant and gum paste, you can use pure gum paste, or you can add tylose to the fondant like I chose to do. Tylose powder helps to harden the fondant much faster and it’s easier to work with than pure gum paste (in my opinion). You can get tylose on Amazon as well here. 

How to Make a Harley Quinn Cake

Ingredients and Materials:

• Prepared vanilla cake 
• Fondant– tan, blue, red, black
• Prepared pink, blue and vanilla buttercream
• Cotton Candy
• Rock candy (stick and string)
• Blue and pink gumballs and candy
• Homemade bubble gum
• Pink lollipop

Procedure:

1. Prepare cakes according to recipe. Allow to cool completely and level cakes before stacking.
2. Stack cakes and cover in vanilla buttercream. Apply splotches of blue and pink buttercream randomly around the cake. Using a flat spatula, or flat edge, smudge coloured buttercream onto and into the vanilla buttercream.
3. Cut out 2 halves of a bat from fondant mixed with tylose or gum paste, and line with cake dowels for support. Allow to dry for at least 24 hours. Insert into the sides of the cake.
4. Print out a Harley Quinn skull image, and cut it out of black fondant. Cut the left ponytail with blue fondant, and the right with red fondant. Cut out the spade from black, and the clubs from red. Cut out additional hearts from black fondant.
5. Place fondant skull on the side of the cake, arranging the pieces into place. Add hearts around the cake.
6. Add rock candy, lollipops, gum balls, etc to the top of the cake.
7. Add cotton candy immediately prior to serving as it will wilt if left on the cake.
8. Keep cake in fridge until you are ready to serve .  It is best consumed within 2-3 days.