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.
WOW! Will you adopt me??
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Now that would be interesting! 😆
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what a lucky girl Isabel is 🙂
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Thanks Tabitha! 😊
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