Doll Cake Design

5 from 1 vote

Here's a simple and easy pink doll cake design in buttercream. This DIY birthday cake with name makes a perfect cake for a girl's birthday!

Prep Time30

Cook Time55

Decorating time1 30

Total Time2 55

Course: Dessert

Cuisine: American

Servings: 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches dome shaped cake

Calories: 6671.1kcal

Preheat oven to 170 °Celsius.
Grease and flour a bowl shaped cake tin (doll cake mold). Set aside.
In a medium sized bowl, beat butter and sugar till soft and creamy for about 2 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
In a separate bowl, sift flour, baking powder, and salt. Fold in the sifted ingredients into the creamed mixture alternately with milk, starting and ending with flour.
Finally, add in vanilla extract and combine well. Pour batter into the well greased and floured doll cake mold and bake for 55 to 60 minutes until the top of the cake springs back when lightly pressed. The cake is done when a skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out without any wet batter.
Remove the cake from oven and let it cool completely before icing and decorating.

Place a paper doily on a round cake board and glue it to the cake board. Make sure the cake board is at least 3 inches larger than the diameter of the doll cake. The paper doily should be the same diameter of the cake board and not larger.
Next, place a layer of clear cellophane sheet on the doily. Cut the cellophane sheet to be slightly larger than the cake board. This sheet will help avoid the grease from the cake from seeping onto the paper doily (and leave unsightly grease marks) as well as protect the doily from any drops of buttercream as you are decorating the cake.
The excess of the cellophane sheet will be trimmed off once the cake has been completed. Hence it is perfectly fine to cut the cellophane paper to a larger size.

Crumb coat the whole cake with a thin layer of light pink buttercream. Insert the doll pick right in the center of the cake. If you are using a full sized doll or a Barbie doll, you will need to cut a hole in the center of the cake to be able to insert the doll into the cake. Cut the hole deep enough to insert the doll until slightly below its waist.
Next, mark the lines for the frills; the top layer, the middle layer and the bottom layers of the dress. The top layer is just a straight line all around the skirt, just below the waist. The second and third layers are wavy lines all around the skirt. Once that is done, using a small star tip ( I used Wilton tip #16) pipe curved zigzags that run horizontally across the doll’s skirt with light pink buttercream icing. Do this in sections, following to the lines that were marked for the frills earlier i.e. the top section and middle section. The bottom section is to be filled entirely with frills, so leave that section blank for now.

Cover the doll’s bodice and dress sleeves with tiny zigzags in the same light pink buttercream.

As for the frills on the dress, use a medium petal nozzle (Wilton tip #104) and a deeper shade of pink buttercream. Pipe the frills along the lines you marked earlier. Hold the tip slanting slightly upwards when piping the frills. This is to avoid scraping off the light pink zigzag icing underneath.
For the bottom part of the dress, pipe 3 layers of frills, starting from the bottom in horizontally curved lines. Once the final layer is completed, using star tip #16, pipe tiny stars along the border of the frills in dark pink icing.

Next, pipe the hand bouquet with some green and red and white icing, using a small star nozzle. Start with the green base, and then randomly pipe and red and white stars on top. After that, using round tip #1 or #2, pipe a tiny string of necklace and a ring for the doll with some white icing.
For added decoration, attach silver dragees on the doll's dress, at the waist, on the frills as well as on the 2 pink flowers cut out from fondant for the hair.

Finish off the cake decoration with the birthday name. Roll some yellow fondant thin and cut the letters out with Wilton alphabet cutters.
Before placing the birthday name on the cake board, trim off the excess cellophane paper on the cake board with a small knife, as close to the cake as possible so that it is not visible.
Arrange the birthday name onto the cake board and to secure the letters on the cake board, brush the back of each letter with a damp brush before arranging them on the cake board.

The amount of cake batter you need for your cake will depend on the size of your cake mold. The recipe measurement provided above is only as a guide based on the cake pan I used to make my doll cake.