Princess Belle Birthday Cake

Finished Princess Belle Birthday Cake

Here is the Princess Belle Birthday cake I made for my daughters' 6th birthday.

Thanks to a cake decorating class, I had the skills to make a few of the pretty extras. You could always buy the flowers in the cake decorating aisle of a craft store and stick them on with icing, so don't be intimidating by this if you don't have any formal cake decorating skills.

I started by making my boxed cake mix and pouring into one round pan and baking part of it in a pyrex mixing bowl. I am still a novice, so you can see I had some trouble getting my bowl piece just right.

(L) my pink flowers, which needed to dry out overnight first; (c) bowl cake piece; (r) round cake

While my two cake pieces were not perfect, the best way to fix cake mistakes is icing, icing, and more icing! Fill in all your holes, smooth out the rough sides, whatever you can.

Next, adding your doll. I was lucky that I had a Belle doll that had clothes painted on. I was able to saran wrap her body and simply put her down into the middle of the cake. If your doll needs clothing added, you may need to dress her and then wrap in saran wrap. Experiment to see what works best.

I added extra flowers in the end to cover this up. I also squeezed extra icing around her legs to hold her steady in the cake. As you can see, my Belle ended up being taller than I had predicted for my cake. In the end I added extra flowers to resolve this.

After icing the cake, I "glued" all my flowers on with icing and added more flourish to pretty up her dress. My little princesses were happy with the cake and I was pretty proud.