'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!!!!

LOL - DH generally finds somewhere else to be when I reach the tears and "it's never going to work" stage (bearing in mind it is normally 2am by then - my DM once asked DS if he helped with cakes - his answer was "no, because Mummy only does them at night" )

DH just read the last 4 posts and has left the room laughing. I think we're both relieved that we're not alone

Perhaps we need a Partners Support Group? :)

on a side issue, Mo - are the ducks recent? I don't think I have seen those before? I tried a duck like that for my father once and found to my cost that fondant behaves very differently in mid-summer than for my DC's winter birthdays - the beak kept sliding off!

stealth I have actually had an idea for the family cake I need to do - have decided to do a plain iced vic sponge and have our 4 initials on the top, with a little symbol on each for each of us (so a red cross on my sister's, a heart on mine (am valentine's baby), DH's country's flag on his, and either the organism my dad works on, or a mushroom on his one. then sparklers in the middle. the only things we have in common are feb birthdays, and a love of spaniels, but my fondant modelling skills only stretch so far (I made a great Timmy from Timmy Time last year!!), and a spaniel is not the easiest of dogs to make!

I am going to try and emulate your tractor cake for DS though, it is brilliant. He'd be the happiest boy ever with a cake made into a tractor.

thanks for the suggestions anyway!

Filly you'll have to put up a photo once your cake is finished! good luck with the move :)

Kveta - tractor cake was one of my very early ones (over 7 years ago now ) - I will check and see which book it was from, but it was definitely one with step-by-step instructions.

Initials sound good - if you made them in advance, you could make each one fairly large, let them dry, and then paint them (food colouring pastes + clear alcohol (gin/vodka, rather than methanol, ideally )) so your person-specific designs could be painted as well as / instead of modelled? That way all the decoration is done in advance and you just have to make cake and plonk them on at the last minute (also, if they are good and dry, they could stand up around the sparkers (or how about one or more of these instead?)

I checked - tractor was from this book.

Ducks were 5 years ago. I know that, because they were for my nephew's first birthday. It was November. And you're right. Making a cake when it's too hot is not good for the icing!

They weren't a Debbie Brown creation, I don't think, but it's just different sized pudding basins iirc. They are very cute aren't they? I didn't have a working camera at the time, so that the closest picture I've got unfortunately.

A quick icing question for you stealth and maureen, then I promise I'll leave you alone to get on with your wondrous cake creations...

I have some perfectly coloured pink fondant icing in the freezer, probably enough to do the dress if I roll it out thinly enough. Can I combine fondant and buttercream for the icing - obviously I can put buttercream under the fondant, but I was thinking more about the decoration...for example, can I do a plain fondant pink dress, then pipe buttercream decoration on? will it stick? Would it look weird if the dress was fondant but the doll has buttercream on her?

Thanks :)

LOL - it is officially quiet season for me and cakes (high season being October - Christmas, when every child for whom I make cakes has their birthdays, several of them in the same week).

I am not sure about your question, TBH. I am not a big user of buttercream, except as mortar/polyfilla. I have used royal icing on top of fondant, but never buttercream. I would worry about the colour bleeding and, personally, would take the coward's way out and buy some white fondant to supplement the pink instead.

Thanks. I usually use buttercream and spend hours carefully piping/blobbing to get nice coverage, but I can see that rolling out pink fondant and slapping it on positioning it will be a lot faster.

Will continue planning....:)

Mo might be along with older wiser words on buttercream. The thing to remember with fondant is that time spent getting the underlying buttercream smooth is time well spent (it doesn't have to look good, just to be smooth) - fondant doesn't cover lumps and bumps, it accentuates them and means you have to stick loads of flowers on to cover them up again.

Eh, she won't!

All my cake books are at school at the moment, as I was helping to decorate Christmas cakes last month, so I can't find a definate answer.

I don't think it'll be a problem though. Afterall, you can use butter icing to fix fondant to fondant.

Agree with Stealth though, the thinner the fondant, the smoother your buttercream will have to be underneath. However, if you have swirls of buttercream on top, then that'll cover any lumps or bumps.

Be ready with lots of sparkly decorations in case you're not happy! Feathers are fabulous too! Barbie could have a stunning dress with feathers around the bottom, like they do on Strictly Come Dancing!

Thank you for the help...I spotted a great tip on the Betty Crocker website for smoothing out the buttercream, so thanks for the heads-up! Still not sure whether I'll go with a smooth buttercream base, then a swirly buttercream 'skirt' with flowers etc or fondant.

Ah, decisions, decisions

Do we have a picture of your cake yet Fillybuster? Expect you're a bit busy moving at the moment, but don't forget now!

Thanks for checking :) Cake hasn't been assembled yet, but I did spend a couple of hours last week pre-cutting it whilst frozen to make sure that everything fitted together....dh timed his arrival home just as I had completed the operation and enjoyed the offcuts....so that part worked well!

I have all my pink fondant, pink buttercream and plain buttercream made up (and a bit of lavendar coloured stuff for any extra swirls) and also in the freezer. Going to move the whole lot to my grans house this week.

Not sure if I'm going to need the extra 9" cakes - removing the dolls stupidly long legs meant that the 2litre bowl cake is a good fit, and will be easier to ice, transport and cut.

Party is in 2 weekends time, so I will take lots of photos and get them up straight after....I promise.

And, once again, thank you thank you thank you for all the help and support :)

You sound scarily organised, Filly. I am in awe.

I think removing the stupid long legs is the way to go. I couldn't quite bring myself to do it in the end, as it wasn't my child I would be traumatising (cake was for DGoddaughter!)

Blimey, you are organised aren't you? Well done. Sounds like it's going well so far.

I am making a cake for 11th Feb and I haven't even given it any thought yet!

I will eagerly await the pictures!

My plan is to have an identical doll with legs on standby to hand to DD when she asks...(I usually do the actual cake cutting in another room, ready to hand out at going home time anyway).

You found a fake Barbie - wise move! One of the reasons I couldn't bring myself to amputate was that I couldn't find any cheap/fake alternatives so it was a genuine Barbie and it seemed an awful waste of money for the birthday girl not to get to keep the horrible thing.

I assembled the cake last night......having made the icing, trimmed the cakes etc etc in advance, the whole process only took about 1.5 hours, which was waaay faster and less stressful than any previous birthday challenge (dh was even allowed to chat to me during the process!)...oh, and the discovery of the benefits of the application of a 'crumb layer' - wow! :) :) :)

The actual party was today - DD1 was delighted. Exactly what she wanted :) :) I was pretty chuffed with myself too...

Photos will be on my profile by tomorrow mornining, but I wanted to say an absolutely mammoth thank you to stealth and maureen for all your words of wisdom, help and support....I luff you guys

Ohhhhhh loving the cakes ladies! I need to make a princess one for my dd's 5th birthday I thought a bundt recipe would work best? I have a large cakecake tin (Nordic one) but wondering now if a pyrex bowl might be easier

I'm going to post pics later today (finally) but my friends dm made an almost identical cake for her dd the week after me in a bundt tin, and it turned out beautifully.

She did have to make 3 9" round cakes for the base, to make it 'tall' enough, so I guess it depends on the depth of your tin.

Not sure I would recommend baking in a pyrex bowl...

Stealth and Maureen.....sorry for the delay but pics are finally up on my profile :)

Thanks again ladies :) :)

Ordinary sponge works in Pyrex bowls.

You can make a jolly good pig with a bun, a 1 pt bowl and 1.5 pt bowl.
(snout, head, body. You cut the side of the large cake at an angle the rest the small cake against it. Add the bun as a snout. Glue together and cover with pink butter cream. Split marshmallow trotted and paste icing ears. Around with green sugar or coconut for grass).

Just wanted to add to this old thread as it's been invaluable to me! DS's 2nd bday is approaching and I decided to make him a spider cake but couldn't find a recipe for baking in a pyrex bowl. Some googling brought me to this thread - hurray! For the record I used Stealth's recipe but scaled it up to 8:16:10:16:16 to fill 1 x 2L Pyrex bowl and 1 x 750 ml Pyrex bowl. I baked both in a Rangemaster fan oven at 140 deg (I've found it to be a hot oven on the whole hence reduced temp) removing the small bowl after 45 mins and the large one after 1.5 hours. Both bowls were filled 2/3 full of batter and after baking were domed but the dome could be easily carved off to give a level surface for decorating. Hope this helps someone else as much as the thread has helped me.