Bethan, from Nottingham, created this fabulous doll cake. Let’s take a look at it…
What did you do?
We started by making a basic cake recipe and baking it in a steam pudding tin.
We made a vanilla sponge using 150g Sr flour 150g butter 150g sugar a tsp vanilla extract 2 eggs and the creaming method. Any flavour or type of cake would work as the doll isn’t heavy to hold up.
Once the cake has cooled for 20 minutes we turned it out the bowl and left it to cool completely.
While the cake was cooling we made fondant icing, you could just buy some ready-made. We made ours by slowly adding 4-5 tbsp of cold water to 250g sieved icing sugar stirring till you can’t anymore then kneading until smooth. Then cling filmed it and put it in the fridge.
Once the cake was cooled, we heated up some apricot jam and mixed it with some water. We spread this over the cake.
We then rolled the fondant icing out into a big circle. We cut a triangle out of the circle to be the opening of the dress. Keep the triangle. We also cut out a heart with a cutter and a thin rectangle.
The triangle is the first piece to go on the cake. It will be the front and centre of the skirt. We painted ours with a bit of water with blue food due in.
The circle of icing is used as the outskirt. Lay this over the cake and allow it to overhang the bottom of the cake like a floor-length dress. Lay the icing a bit loose so you can shape the folds of the dress. Once the skirts are on put the doll in place.
Use the heart as the front of the top and the thin rectangle as the back if the top. Making sure to cover the seam between the cake and the doll.
Once the cake was iced fully I let my daughter loose with cake pens to add her designs to the dress like Angelina Jolie’s wedding dress.
You could use this tin: https://amzn.to/2WRE0eZ
The doll is used was this: https://amzn.to/39nUbFT
These are the pens that we used: https://amzn.to/2ONroRN
What’s your next project idea?
We will be making bread animals.
Tell us a bit about yourself…
I’m Bethan. I have 1 daughter who is 3. We are from Nottingham, England.
How are you finding being housebound with kids?
As a single mum, who works full time, when will I have the opportunity to spend as much time together enjoying fun activities without work or anything else getting in the way. It would be lovely to go and see our friends and have hugs and family nights and cook food together but for now, we have more time than ever to video call each other and really share all the funny little things the kids are doing or what we have made today. After all, this is over we can look back and cherish all the memories made and things we have learnt together.
In our group chats this week we have been sharing recipes, activity ideas, parenting advice and supporting each other on good and bad days. I genuinely feel closer to my friends than before because we are having to work harder to keep in touch and communicate with each other. The sense of community and the need to help each other has shone through and we have all pulled together. Be it just listening to a rant about rubbish situations or letting each other know where to buy flour.
All the distractions of life and work have stopped and I can finally spend quality time with Kaitlyn making an octopus (dragged out over a week) and painting her room an awful shade of pink she picked out. We will be working on our garden and Kaitlyn is super excited to eat the lettuce we are growing and cooking with the herbs we are growing. She is hoping to see lots of birds in the garden using the bird feeder we made once the garden has flowers potted.
As rubbish as it is that I have been furloughed, I am excited to see what else we can do in this time out from normal life.
Any tips to help people when they are housebound with kids?
Talk to people, listen to music and enjoy the small things in life. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
What do you think of the HWK community?
Anything to increase communication and spread a bit of happiness is a good thing in the current situation.
