When I was little, my idea of the perfect birthday cake was having a beautifully decorated doll cake. My Mum did make me one once, which looking back was probably the pinnacle of my childhood. Though she did traumatise me a bit by cutting my doll in half to fit the cake.

My daughter loves all things Frozen (still – we had a Frozen party last year) and Elsa is her favourite Disney princess of all time. So for her birthday this year I decided to make her an Elsa doll cake (without cutting the Elsa doll in half). You can purchase special dolls that don’t have legs for making a doll cake, but as I needed to make an Elsa doll cake, I purchased a 30 cm Elsa doll from a toy shop.

As the doll is tall, the cake also needed to be high. I ended up having to make two chocolate mud cakes (you can find the recipe here), a bundt or kugelhupf cake tin (with a hole in the middle) cut into three layers and a 9 inch (23 cm) round cake cut into two layers. This gave me a cake that was 15 cm high. Add buttercream icing to the layers and the cake would fit the doll perfectly.

Items I used

• 30 cm doll
• 1 bundt/kugelhupf cake (9 inch)
• 1 round 9 inch cake
• 3 batches of buttercream icing (coloured blue) – see recipe below
• 200g blue fondant for the back of the doll dress
• 100g white fondant for snowflake decorations
• Snowflake plunger cutters to make decorations
• Silver cachous and white sprinkles
• Rose tip piping nozzle and piping bag

Before assembling the doll cake, I made three batches of buttercream icing. Whip the butter until it is light and fluffy then gradually add the icing sugar and milk. Once the icing is made, add a very small amount of food gel colour and then mix it in thoroughly.

My go to recipe for buttercream icing (1 batch) that is also easy to pipe is:

• 250 g unsalted butter (room temperature)
• 3 cups of icing or confectioners sugar
• 2 tblsp milk
• Small amount of food colour gel

I placed one round cake layer down and cut a hole in the middle (I used a wine glass); added some butter cream and added the second layer on top. Continue adding more buttercream and cake layers until the bundt cake is on top of the round cake. I used one batch of buttercream to do this.

With the second batch of buttercream I coated the outside of the domed cake. This is called applying a crumb coat. I also wrapped the doll in aluminium foil before placing it in the middle so that it didn’t move around too much.

To decorate, I rolled out a rough triangle shape piece of fondant and placed it over the cake on the back. This formed the back of the dolls dress. On the front of her dress I piped buttercream rosettes. To make sure I ended up with evenly sized flowers, I used a small wine glass to make indents in the crumb coat to use as a guide when piping the rosettes. I filled the gaps afterwards with random piping.

I finished off the decorations with lots of white fondant snowflakes, silver cachous and white sprinkles. A perfect doll cake for our little princess.