A Frozen Queen Elsa Birthday Cake Tutorial (sort of)

In case any of you parents out there have children as obsessed with Frozen as Lily, I figured I could share a teeny bit about how to make a Queen Elsa Birthday cake. But be warned, there were tears when we had to actually cut the cake.

To start, I made a homemade strawberry cake using this recipe from the Smitten Kitchen. I poured the batter into a special Wilton Cake Pan, but I found tutorials online that showed people using mixing bowls to make the shape. I followed the cake pan cooking time vs the recipe cooking time, and it took over an hour!

 I let it cool for about an hour while I made the strawberry cream cheese frosting. For the frosting, I pureed 1 cup of frozen strawberries, mixed them into 8oz of melted cream cheese and half a stick of butter. Then, using my mixers, I added about 1 box, or 4 cups of confectioners sugar and some blue food coloring.

I used a spatula to glob the icing on to the top of the cake, and let it run down the cake naturally instead of smearing the icing down, which worked great! I added some pearl sprinkles I found and some snowflake icing decorations I found as well, then inserted an Elsa Barbie doll. Now, here comes the embarrassing truth.... When I insert the barbie doll, the cake didn't even go up to her thighs!! I was so upset and didn't want to make another cake to go under the dress part so I pulled off her legs. Yup. I ruined Elsa. I am still trying to figure out how to glue them back on in a way that they can move. But hey, it worked! Yeah, I am crazy. This is what happens when you bake a cake at 11 at night and have a perfect mental image of what you want.

And besides, this little three year old was over the moon about her Elsa cake, and I'm over the moon about this little girl.