How to make your own Princess Birthday Cake

It was Miss T's birthday yesterday. As someone who is rubbish at baking, I'm always on the lookout for easy birthday cakes to make. Last year we spotted the pigs in mud cake doing the rounds on facebook, so I made one for D's birthday. This year he wanted a minion so I used 2 microwave cakes made in Christmas pudding bowls for that. And here's another simple idea using a bowl shaped microwave cake; A Princess cake.

I've made this before in blue for J's third birthday when he was really into dolls and dolls houses and also made it in pink for my sister. But as I had some yellow icing left over from last months Minion cake, I thought it would also look good in yellow.

It really is a simple cake to make - I promise! It can cost around £50 to buy a cake that is similar so it is great to be able to make your own. I've re-used the same doll over the past 7 years so the only additional cost is the cake ingredients and icing.

Here it is step by step:

1. Start by making a simple 4 minute microwave cake. Full recipe for that can be found here.

2. Once the cake is completely cool you can begin to decorate it. You can always make the cake the day before. You could even make it several days before and pop it in the freezer, defrosting it ready to decorate. Place your cake onto a cake base. I re-used a circular cake base. If you need to make your own budget version just cover some thick card with foil.

3. Prepare your doll ready for the cake. I use a doll with legs removed so that I don't need to make a cake with a huge amount of height. However, you can actually buy or hire full sized cake tins if you do want to use a full height doll. Or you could stack a bowl cake on top of a regular round cake to get the height which is what I did before for the blue and pink princess cakes.

Optional: You can stack cakes if you want to get more height

To prepare the doll, you need to wrap a little clingfilm from the waist down. Then wrap some ribbon of the colour of your choice around the top half of the doll. I use a ribbon that is the same as the colour of icing for the skirt.

I also added a thin yellow ribbon to her hair. I cut out the huge clothes loops that you tend to find in ladies clothes these days and re-use them for things like this or for crafts.

4. Cover your microwave cake with jam. We used 'no-bits' strawberry jam but you could use any flavour jam you like. You could also add a layer of buttercream if you wish to (we didn't on this occasion).

5. Next colour your 'ready to roll' icing in the right colour. I found these Dr Oetker gel food colours recently that seem to work well. I used 'sunshine yellow' for this but mixed in with the white icing it comes out a lovely pastel yellow.

6. Dust your surface and a rolling pin with icing sugar to prevent the icing from sticking. Then roll out your (now coloured) ready to roll icing. Remember it is better to make it bigger than you need it as you can always cut off any excess. I used around 750g of icing for a cake this size.

7. Carefully lift the rolled out icing and place over your cake. You can use your rolling pin to help lift it over the cake. The great thing about this cake is that you don't need to be mega-neat as the dress could do with having a couple of folds in anyway.

8. Trim off any excess from around the bottom of the dress with a knife, and cut a small hole in the top of the cake ready for the doll.

9.Push your doll into the top of the cake until the clingfilmed part of the doll is pushed into the cake.

10. Now re-roll the icing that you trimmed off the dress, and using a medicine spoon cut some shapes you can use to decorate around the dolls waist to tidy the gap where the doll goes into the cake.

11. Finally, decorate the dress with either small flowers or hearts using a small icing cutter. We made little white flowers for the dress.

If you wish to, you could also pipe some white icing around the bottom of the dress. (I had run out of white icing in an icing tube so we missed out that stage this time).

You should now have a pretty princess party cake made at budget price with minimum effort. Seeing the cake in yellow made me think it would also make a nice cake for Easter too!

A pretty princess cake

---------------------------------
Remember that during April and May 2014, we're also blogging over at Nectar Savvy family with our top budgeting tips - please do pop by and say hello over there! 

------------

linking up with Vevivos' #PoCoLo:

and also Savouring The Season as I reckon this cake would make a lovely Easter cake in pastel spring colours: