The Barbie cake

Disclaimer: no Barbies were harmed in the making of this blog post. Or in the making of the cake.

Sydney wanted a Barbie-themed birthday this year. And so, as any good mom would do, I checked out the sheet cake options at our local grocery store's bakery. But no luck. Apparently Barbie isn't one of the licensed characters they're allowed to reproduce.

So then I thought about cupcakes, figuring I could buy Barbie rings to stick in each of them. But again, on short notice (i.e. no time to buy online) I struck out. It was right about the time I was staring at the lack of Barbie party favors in the party supply row at Target that it hit me.

Duh!

If Sydney wants a Barbie cake, I'll make her a REAL Barbie cake.

All I needed was a victim. And Target had plenty of those.

Sydney was quite excited to see the Barbie on the counter. Until I told her she couldn't play with it because it was for her cake.

"You're not putting my Barbie on my cake," she told me with conviction.

"That's right," I assured her before throwing the curveball, "I'm putting Barbie IN your cake."

Sydney looked horrified, so I googled "Barbie cake" and showed her some examples. 

I shouldn't have done that.

Talk about setting the bar impossibly high! Sydney was fascinated as she clicked through the expertly decorated examples of fondant- and frosting rose-covered doll cakes.

The morning of her party, I started baking cakes. Pampered Chef offers a recipe using one of their mixing bowls, which I have. But it requires baking two cakes, each for an hour and 15 minutes. I'm not that patient. Reading the recipe, I saw that you only use the bottom half of the second cake, to give it enough height. 

I decided to improvise. Looking at the cake mix box, it listed options for two 9" round cakes or 24 cupcakes. Perfect, I thought. I'll bake one 9" round for the bottom of the cake, and then make 12 cupcakes, which are easier to serve, anyway.

Problem: a nine-inch round cake is only about an inch tall. Which means, when you stack the pampered chef bowl cake on top of it and then stick Barbie in the middle, the cake only reaches her mid-thigh.

Improvising again, I cut off the excess width from the round cake, and started piecing it together around Barbie's hips, using frosting to hold it all in place.

It was right about that time Jeff walked by and said, "That looks really good, Hon."

No it doesn't! It looked horrible, and now I'm questioning what I really looked like on all those occasions when he's sweetly told me that I look really good.

But the nice thing, I quickly discovered, about making a Barbie cake is that what matters most is the frosting. And so if something isn't working/looking right, you just add more frosting. And I've never heard a kid complain about a cake with too much frosting.

Ta dah! The finished product. In all its frosted glory:

It was by no means good, but I've seen far worse. I let Sydney frost the cupcakes, to which we added homemade Barbie decorations. (Thanks, Pinterest!) Rather than stick candles in the cake and risk setting the doll's hair aflame, we used a corner cupcake.

The moment of truth:

Success!

And now she wants me to make another one for her party for her friends next weekend. Should be a piece of cake.