Tinkerbell Cake

About 6 months ago my then 2 and a half year old was climbing all over me when I stumbled across a youtube tutorial on 'my cupcake addiction' for a Tinkerbell dolly cake, she declared then and there that this was the cake she would have for the birthday, I just said 'yeah no worries honey' and continued on my day.  But a month out from her birthday when I asked her what cake she would like me to make her, my little child that has a memory like a steel trap quickly said 'Tinkerbell one Mummy'.  Last weekend was her Party so I spent the friday afternoon making the cake and the Saturday afternoon decorating it.  It really was one of the easiest cakes I have done and it definitely is one of the prettiest!

Here's a brake down of what I did.



It all starts with a giant cupcake tin, I have had mine for years now so it is always great to be able to get it out to use again. The cake itself is a Chocolate cake with peppermint buttercream and fondant leaves.  You can find the chocolate cake recipe I used here, it was the perfect amount of batter for the tin, I filled the side of the top of the cupcake first and then the deeper bottom side.

The cake took roughly an hour to bake, the tricky part with the giant cupcake tin is that the 'top' side is always going to bake quicker than the 'bottom'.  For this reason I baked it on the lower heat than i usually would at 160 degrees.  I also covered the 'top' side with foil once it was close to being done, so make sure you are keeping a close eye on the baking process.

Once baked it really needs to be completely cool making it easier to carve into the doll shirt shape. This is why I made the cakes the day before I planned on decorating.  The carving part is the hardest part of this cake, I started off by trimming down the well cooked edges of both cakes, and slicing off the excess domes to create a nice flat surface.  I then cut the 'bottom' in half then cut out circles in 3 slices of cake creating hole so I could fit the Tinkerbell doll I bought in and some surprise lollies.

Now it was the time to make the yummy peppermint buttercream and cut out at least 120 green leaves.

Peppermint Buttercream Ingredients

• 250 grams of butter
• 5 cups of Icing sugar
• green colouring
• 2 teaspoons peppermint flavouring.  

How you do it...

• Start off whipping your butter in a mix master or hand mixer for a good 5 mins until it is lightens up
• Adding in your icing sugar, I like to do it about 1/2 a cup at a time so I can keep and eye on how thick it is. 
• Add your colour and flavour and continue to whip it for another good 5 minutes, make sure you scape your bowl down a few times through this process.

For the leaves you need some ready to roll fondant that you have coloured green.  Colouring fondant is easy you need to kneed the fondant with your desired amount of colouring, kneed, kneed, kneed until it is all even.  Once coloured, roll it out on your bench that has been dusted with corn flour, I have a fondant mat so used that to roll it out.  Now for cutting out the leaves, I cheated and am so glad I did, I purchased a leaf fondant cutter that gives the leaves beautiful markings, much easier than hand cutting a hundred odd leaves.  Store the leaves under some greaseproof paper keeping them from drying out before you place them on Tinkerbell's skirt.

Ready to put it all together!

Now onto the construction of Tinkerbell.

I started with stacking the cakes, on a small sliver cake board
sticking down the first layer with some of the buttercream.  The first layer is the piece with widest circumference, the second layer is the next widest and of course the top layer is the narrowest piece.   I placed Tinkerbell into the hole I cut out earlier, I had wrapped her legs in glad wrap to help keep her clean and because I was making it a piñata cake I also stuffed in as many peppermint M&M as I could.  After Tink was in place I gave the whole cake a quick crumb coat with some buttercream to lock all the little stray crumbs in place, I like to let it sit and set for a good 10 minutes at this point.  After the buttercream got a nice crust on it, I applied a nice thick coat of buttercream over the top.  Now was the time to work fast and start sticking down all the leaves down, to get a good coverage I slightly overlapped each leaf, working layer by layer, trying to keep the height of the leaves at the same level.  To finish it off I added some hot pink flowers to add brake up the green.

Tinkerbell was a huge success, we had one very happy excited 3 year old on our hands!