My third cake in the past week, no more for a while now I think! I always wanted a doll cake as a little girl, so when my friend said her daughter wanted either a doll, a monster, or a yellow truck, there was no contest! This is my first girly cake, I loved doing it :o) She has a fair bit of food glitter on her (hard to photograph glitter), which I blame on Natalie who informed me there is no such thing as too much glitter. I was going to just do her wings, but something took a hold of me and my brush went crazy before I knew what was happening, I was like a glitter wielding woman possessed!

She’s lemon sour cream cake with raspberry buttercream filling. I didn’t have a dolly varden skirt cake tin, so I baked four 2" tall cakes and stacked them, then trimmed to shape. I used one of each of these sizes: 8", 7", 6" and 5". The dolly varden tin is about 2" at the waist and 7.75" at the bottom, so this worked out about right. And I think baking the cakes separately would make a more moist cake than a dolly varden tin, do you think? It really wasn’t hard to carve, I would do it again this way by preference rather than use the dolly varden tin.

The design is by Artisan cakes, one of the few doll cake designs I have seen and loved straight away.

I made the petals out of a mixture of fondant and modelling chocolate, it was quite fiddly to get the ruffles right as the chocolate was so soft. How do other people manage that with modelling chocolate?