'Firm' (but rising!) birthday cake recipe for making Princess dress part of cake....help!!!

[Fillybuster]

Help!

DD1 has requested a 'Princess Fairy' cake for her birthday party next month. My plan was to bake the 'dress' in a 9" pyrex bowl (to be inverted and covered with icing), with a 9" round sandwich tin cake to go underneath for extra height. Then I just cut some holes, plunge my naked doll in, and ice the lot. Easy, right?

Except I had a trial run with Nigella's 'birthday cake' (from Dom Goddess) recipe last week, which she specifically recommends for this sort of cake. The bowl cake rose too much in the middle, but stayed low around the sides, and is quite a dense cake, so it sank down and lost even more of its height when cooling.

Delicious, but no use at all.

Before I give up and move onto Plan B (a patterned ring mold on top of a 11" springform, which will look much less 'dress like'), can anyone please recommend a reliable recipe for the pyrex bowl approach?

I'm moving house in 2 weeks so really need to get the baking done, and into my mums freezer, to be ready ahead of time.....

Thank you!!!!

wow, stealth your cakes are phenomenal! I LOVE the science party one, how did you make a flask shaped cake?

I need some decorating ideas, as I have to make a cake for 4 people (a single cake) who are turning 28 (female, nurse), 30 (female, scientist (me)), 35 (male, software developer) and 58 (male, scientist), and last year went with a plain vic sponge with numbers on it. Bit dull, so want to do something a bit more exciting this year! Any ideas, or should I start a fresh thread somewhere?

grr. MN appears to be blocked @ work.

as anyone who owns any of the same books as me would tell you, most of my cakes are straight out of Lindy Smith and Debbie Brown books.

homeagain I will answer properly later (and multi-person cake Q as well) but you could go one of 2 ways - make & decorate Thurs, when madeira or the nigella buttermilk cake would both be fine, or bake, freeze, thaw en route and decorate once there as filly suggests.

kveta - flask is carved from stack of round cakes of various sizes

Thanks stealth.

brilliant, thanks stealth I look forward to hearing ideas later!!

Ah-Ha - it was the network connection, not any sort of blocking!

homeaway - what I was going to say but couldn't type fast enough on my 'phone was that which of the two options you go for depends on the journey, really. Assembled cakes are a bit of a nightmare to travel with - they slide across boards, get dropped, and otherwise conspire to destroy themselves. So, if you have a fairly easy car journey to guest house, I would be tempted to make the whole thing before you go - Thursday would be fine (for buttermilk or madiera - vic sponge would be borderline)- my cakes are normally done that far in advance so that I can concentrate on the rest of the party (except for ones where I am only supplying the cake for someone else's party, but even then I try and have them finished the night before so that they have time to set, which means the cake is at least a couple of days old).

If OTOH you are travelling by train/plane/whatever then I would definitely travel with frozen, uniced cake and icing (personally I might opt for ready-made icing for ease) and assemble it there. One option might be to go to a local sugarcraft shop and get a cake topper of some sort (or order one online) - that way you do fairly straightforward icing and then dump something on top of it.

Kveta - what do all the recipients of this cake have in common, and how ambitious are you feeling? My first thought was that if (for example) you meet up in the pub, or over pizza, you could do a "table" cake in the same vein as this but a pub/restaurant table? Or something else based on whatever you all have in common??

Stealth we are going by car but just rememberd dd borrowed my tupperware cake box to take to a party and of course it is still at the party venue :(. Still i suppose i could take it in a box. He is not fussy he just wants vibrant colours so could just do a plain round 8 or 9 inch sponge for him and put the butter icing on . The journey will at least be 8 hours door to door so probably madiera is best. Next question anybody got a recipe? , can i put it in two tins and sandwich them together or should i make a big one and attempt to cut it? I can never cut straight though!! I know to buy a cake would be easier but as he is first year of uni and we dont see him very often i thought i would make the effort. My other ds has his 17th a week before so i could do a trial run. Thanks

Filly - cake quantity calculator here might help (translation: I forgot to look up 9" cakes last night )

see below for madiera recipe - or the Nigella Buttermilk one can be found with a little googling . I would make 2 and sandwich them IIWY.

Thanks stealth...I'm working from home today trying to sort out my cv so was hoping to have a go this afternoon before the dcs come home from school.

hmm...probably a bit late in the day for that now, unless I hit the kitchen in the next 5 mins. Otherwise tonight :)

two cakes it is then. thank you :)

My R2D2 is on my profile. Copied from Stealth!

Maureen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

oh dear....

Baking update...the 2 litre bowl is back in the oven with Stealth's madeira mix. Fingers crossed on a better result this time....if it works I'll chuck the sandwich pans through tomorrow with the same mix (possibly with some cocoa, mainly for the look of the thing when we slice it)....

this is not fair ( off in a huff) why cant i produce anything like that. Cakes always taste fine but i could never attempt anything like that. Hats off to you all.

Practice makes perfect! (Or in my case, practice gives you sneaky ideas on how to cover up mistakes!)

Can you mould Play-Doh? If so, then you can mould icing. Really. Gwan, gwan. Have a go!

Please bear in mind, that I have been making cakes for people since I was 20! I am now everso much older than that. DD is 16, for a start. Her first cake was the classic Chocolate button hedgehog!

learning to hide mistakes definitely the core skill. I tell people that if they can do plasticine they can do fondant icing. If you want to try, get a debbie brown book and just follow the instructions. The only thing is - take no notice of the timings. What she reckons takes 30mins takes me a good couple of hours!

Oh dear...had to give it nearly an extra 30 mins (nearly 2 hours....) to get it to cook to the middle, but it still looks like a volcano :( :( There's a good 2 inches of space between the top of the cake and the top of the bowl all the way around the sides, although it does rise above the top in the middle.

And the thing is, I really can bake...I mean, I bake a LOT, and have a reasonably good (if amateur) rep amongst my friends, most of whom are pretty keen cooks themselves.

But this isn't working for me :(

DH reckons that with some judicious trimming, the addition of a couple of 9" sandwich tin cakes and lots of icing as filler it will look ok.

Second that. In fact, if you buy a Debbie Brown book, you'll see a lot of my cakes! Perfect for beginners. It shows you in pictures step by step how to mould and even has templates in the back to follow.

Once you get the hang of things, Flickr is your friend. Hundreds and hundred of cake ideas on there.

It'll be fine! Lots of sparkly pretty things around the bottom or wherever you're not happy. There are so many things on the market these days, that you can use to fill or cover up.

Think positive. DD will love it, because you made it. It'll taste twice as good as a shop bought one too. In years to come, DD will remember the ones you made, far more readily than the ones you bought.

Looking forward to seeing the results!

Bought??!! Never! In fact, this cake is causing some tension as we will be completely homeless by the time we get to dd1's party and the rest of my family have been trying to convince me that a bought cake, just this once, would be fine.

DH reckons that my entire focus on baking the perfect fairy-dress cake, at the point we're packing up our house and preparing to camp out at my parents with 3 dcs and an aupair (oh yes, i'm a ft wohm :) ) is pretty much grounds for divorce....:) :) I see it as a welcome distraction from the harsh realities of packing boxes....

I am very inspired by your sugarcraft....will check out the books, but perhaps not in time for this cake. Realistically, I will make up a big batch of very pink fondanct icing, roll it out, cut out a series of curved triangle shapes and apply them in overlapping layers to create the dress....or apply huge amounts of swirly pink buttercream to the same effect - I haven't decided yet. Then pipe buttercream over the bodice, add lots of sparkly pink stuff, flowers, stars etc and be very proud of myself :) :)

Thanks for all the support...I know it will be fine, I'm just a bit of a perfectionist on the cake-baking front and was hoping that with all the amazing MN expert advice I would be able to pull the rabbit out of the hat!

Oh bugger. It has worked for me, honest.

Never mind. Trim it to wherever it is flat (ish - small gaps you can fill). Bake as many sandwich cakes as it will take to bring it up to the length of dolls legs (warning - if you are working with a Barbie they have really long legs). Get all the cakes good and cold (fridge cold) and then stack them up with buttercream. Then you can carve to your hearts content with a bread knife. If you look closely at mine, it is more of a rounded rectangle than a circle anyway (can't remember which instructions I was following at the time ). Once carved, cover with buttercream, stick in in the fridge until good and cold, and then either add another layer or re-smooth the buttercream with a knife dipped in hot water. Get that good and smooth and it matters not one bit how smooth or otherwise the underlying cake is - you have your flat surface for decorating.

Go to town with flowers and glitter, finish with a lustre spray and you will be the best Mummy in the entire world

FWIW we moved house on my 6th birthday - I didn't get a cake and have never quite recovered. Tell your DH that (it's true!)

Oh it's always grounds for divorce in this house, when I'm creating cakes! Especially when I made the ducks. I actually threw the first one at the wall, which broke a cup mid flight!

However, R2D2 was sensitively dealt with and DH was very supportive! It was for my DB 40th, so a little bit more special than the others! He did sigh in relief when we arrived at the party though and the cake was in position. I think he said, 'thank fuck that's over, can I have a drink now?'