Dress Adventures with Elsa

My niece, Madlynn, turned five this week (HOW DID SHE GET SO OLD!?), and gone are the days when I would come up with a random idea for her birthday treats, like these sheep cupcakes, or butterfly cupcakes. This year, Madelynn requested a very specific Frozen themed cake. Basically, the cake is the dress on an Elsa doll.

This was a little outside my comfort zone, but I watched a few YouTube videos and felt fairly comfortable with the process. I have photo-documented my dress adventures with Elsa!

Elsa observes the cooling cakes.

First, I started with four eight inch cake rounds. I'm not going to lie... I have a dirty secret! I used a box mix to make these cakes, rather than making them from scratch! It's so shameful! But I'm 35 weeks pregnant, and I couldn't find the energy to stand and measure out the ingredients... And now that I've done it once, I may have to go back to box mix again! You won't tell anyone... Right?

Elsa takes a bubble bath.

Next, I gave Elsa a thorough bath. Considering I literally picked her up from my sister's doorstep, I figured this was a necessary step. I also gave her hair a brush, and braided it up.

Huge mess.

Next, I whipped up a batch of vanilla buttercream frosting. I've made this frosting recipe several times, and I'm honestly not sure what I was thinking. The recipe said to keep the stand mixer at medium while adding a 1/2 cup of icing sugar at a time. So... I did that, and icing sugar exploded everywhere. So, note to self, turn the stand mixer to low while adding icing sugar. I know that! I have always done that before. I will blame that mistake on baby brain.

Elsa's make-shift shower cap.

After thoroughly drying off Elsa, I wrapped her legs in saran wrap, and made a make-shift shower cap out of saran wrap and tape to keep her hair clean from frosting and cake. Then I stacked, balanced and frosted the four layers of cake.

The next step was to cut out a hole for Elsa. I probably could have used a fifth layer of cake to cover her hips, but thanks to my YouTube video watching, I was prepared for some re-jigging once I had trimmed the cake to the shape of a dress.

I used the cake trimmings to stack up the dress around her hips, and used more frosting to anchor everything in place.

Hombre buttercream.

I took the remaining buttercream frosting and whipped three different batches with blue food colouring to make a set of gradational frosting.

Elsa's dress crumb coat.

My least favourite part of frosting cakes is applying the crumb coat. This is a thin layer of frosting that is meant to seal in the crumbs from the cake so that you can apply decorations without crumbs sticking out. This crumb coat was not very fun, because trimming through the cake let loose a whole new level of crumbs. After I had sufficiently covered the cake, I put it in the fridge for half an hour so the crumb coat would solidify.

Elsa's unadorned dress.

As you can see, the next layer of frosting was a lot easier to apply, and a lot smoother when applied over the crumb coat. This left me with a blank canvas to decorate.

Elsa dress cake.

And... Here she is! Elsa in all her glory! I don't know about you, but I'd wear a dress like that, any day! 

Niece loved her-- it was totally worth it!