The Barbie Cake Demo

Maggie told me that sbe would like to have a Barbie birthday party and she clarified that to mean a Barbie birthday cake. Good thing she told me or I would've invited a Princess Barbie to come to the party. For her fourth birthday party I had invited Ariel from Little Princess Party Fun I could do the same but she didn't seem that excited about it. The plan this year is to have all the girls bring along a barbie doll and they can all play in the Barbie Dream house and the Dora Castle (which could double as a Barbie Castle). There's just one thing, there's only one Ken doll with only a pair of combat pants (found him shirtless at a garage sale). Mens doll fashions are hard to track down! We'll do nails at the party too; little brothers tagging along can play soccer out in the backyard.

The cake I planned to make. Source

My biggest task is the Barbie doll cake. I even looked up local businesses online to find a baker that could deliver. Delivery for $30 made me reconsider the possibly that maybe I could just try to do something myself, like my own daughter's birthday cake.

This is fairly significant project to tackle. I own the Pampered Chef Large Batter Bowl that is often used for this design. You can actually bake the cake inside that bowl! found some good ideas. I really don't have an excuse not to do it myself other than time...

HOW TO MAKE A BARBIE CAKE

I decided on a beautiful and simple design, easy to decorate. White cream cheese frosting with ornate pink flowers design.

This afternoon I tried out the perfectly pink Barbie cake recipe made naturally pink with fresh strawberries. Divine!

The Pampered Chef Recipe calls for baking two bowl cakes for the assembly. Perhaps it makes a taller and slimmer dress.  It's possible to use a simple cake mix but I forgot and sent the husband out to buy a bag of flour so I just looked for a strawberry cake recipe from allrecipes.com

Cake from scratch

Natural Red

Rookie Mistakes #1: I forgot to mix the dry and wet ingredients separately. I can kinda measured it out altogether in the big mixing bowl and the cake batter alone turned out dry and crumbly. Fortunately, I mixed the 10 large strawberries and pack of jello powder separately in the Ninja and I was able to add the chunky cake mixture from the bowl in the Ninja bit by bit, with a little help from the little brother chef. Then I poured the whole thing back into the Pampered Chef bowl.

Rookie Mistake #2: I forgot to grease the sides of the glass bowl! Three hours later after cooling with the bowl upside down, I still have not removed the cake. I decided to begin scraping the sides with a thin spatula. I didn`t get all the way to bottom but I turned the bowl upside to let gravity do the work. Oh-oh. The top of the cake was stuck to the glass so it was separated from the bottom. Fortunately this is the trial run.

Baking time modification - 350degrees for 1 hour 10minutes. The center was still quite wet. Baked for 350 for an additional 20 minutes.

Chef Brother

Ready to Bake!

Next Steps
I got a baking tip from a mom blog, to freeze the cake for a day and apply the frosting with a hot knife for evenness.

Anyway since the first baking didn`t work out, I used it for level cake cutting practise. I froze the wider part of the cake for my birthday, to test the thawing process.

Alternate Designs
This one is not the typical Barbie cake but I really like her thoughts on planning her own 17th birthday party. Her lifelong ambitions, her childhood heros. This two barbie design takes the cake!

This model takes a different construction approach, using many thin layers of cake to form the Barbie dress. I thought her dress was made from thin bages! Stunning.

Games
In the meantime I could plan the decorations, cake and invitations.
I found a great website with lots of ideas
Colouring Pages   Crafts   Games

The Final Reveal
As it turns out, my daughter saw me messing with the failed cake to which she announced, "I don't even want a barbie cake. I said I wanted a cheesecake" I had to correct the tone of voice but I was mildly relieved. Alrighty then! We used the biggest part of the bowl cake for my round birthday cake. The kids helped with applying the cream cheese icing and extra sprinkles. It turned out very yummy with the embedded strawberries and strawberry jello!

To accomodate that request, I bought an assorted cheesecake from the Loblaws-T&T bakery for the party. A mom also made a dozen chocolate allergy cupcakes (for her sons) but the other kids loved those too! We ended up ordering a Barbie slab cake from the bakery at the grocery store; it's Barbie Fairytopia in the Peony! However the kids could not resist touching the cake so there were mild smudges at some sides by the time we got to the Happy Birthday song; twenty kids and 5 adults.