Are you getting tired of me going on about Frozen yet?  Maybe I haven't posted about it nearly as much as I think about it and bake about it and listen to it, but it feels to me like Elsa and Anna are showing no signs of slowing down their reign among the Kindergarten girl set.  (Listen to me, sounding like I'm complaining when I actually totally love it.)  

I'm sure its target audience spans more than the 4 and 5 year old girls I happen to be surrounded by, and I would love to know if there are older kids (and boys?!) who are as into this movie as these little girls are.

At any rate, I was approached last week by a friend of a friend I used to work with at Labatt (again, LOVE how the internet works!) about making a Frozen cake for her daughter's 5th birthday.  She was torn between a sweet, simple, single-tier round cake with an Olaf fondant figurine (similar to this one) vs. a doll cake.

Yes, you know the doll cake.  THAT doll cake.  The one with the Barbie stuck in the cake so the cake looks like a massive, oversized, edible Gone with the Wind dress.

(PS When are these dresses coming back into style?  I'm so ready for them to make a comeback!)

When she asked for my opinion, I could not hold back.  I told her she would be crowned Best Mom Ever if she got her daughter a doll cake.  As far as I'm concerned, for a 5-year-old girl with a penchant for princesses, the doll cake is IT.  It doesn't get any better.  A 5-year-old who gets a doll cake is living the dream.  And there is such a small window in a little girl's life when it is so perfect.  By the time she turns 6 or 7, she is on to bigger things, and her little girl princess dreams are just memories.

Or maybe it's just me trying live vicariously because I never got a doll cake of my own.  (Ahem, MOM, I'm looking at you.)

So she went for it!  She dropped her daughter's Elsa doll off with me so I could build the cake around her, because as we all know, it is impossible to get your hands on any Elsa merchandise right now.  (Language warning, but here is an article about how crazy some parents are getting about this stuff.)

Unexpectedly, it turned out that the Elsa doll she brought was a good 4 or 5 inches taller than your standard Barbie doll, who is 11.5 inches tall.  So the cake dress for Elsa turned out to be a solid 6 layers of cake!

Look at Elsa's hair.  This is one well-loved doll.

I wrapped her dress up tightly in plastic wrap to make sure she emerged unscathed after the party, and cut out a hole in each cake layer for her to rest in.  There is a small support structure under those top 6-inch layers, which makes this essentially a 2-tier cake.

After a bit of carving with a serrated knive to get to that dress shape, I piped on a couple of pounds (not even joking - this was one big cake!) of buttercream and smoothed it all out with my offset spatula.  We left this cake with a buttercream finish rather than fondant, all the better for little kids to stick their fingers into!

Here she is after she was crumb coated (or as the Cake Boss likes to call it, "dirty iced"):

A bit of ice blue buttercream and some piped snowflakes later, Elsa the snow queen emerged. 

Granted, her dress is a wee bit bulkier than it appeared in the film, but I can guarantee you that Disney did not animate six layers of chocolate cake under this dress:

Happy 5th birthday, Sydney!

As I've mentioned before, our home, along with millions of others worldwide, has (willingly and happily) fallen prey to the Disney marketing machine.  Frozen has taken our home by storm, and Olaf seems to be the most frequently quoted character around here.  Four-year-old Stacey's latest favorite saying is, "He's cra-a-a-a-a-zy" out of the corner of her mouth.  Two-year-old Clara frequently tries to take off her head à la Olaf after the fall off the cliff.  Even Andrew busts out some of Olaf's great lines when I least expect it ("Oh look at that.  I've been impaled.") 

So I was ridiculously excited when one of Andrew's old friends from high school connected with me via facebook (don't you love how the internet works sometimes?!) and requested a Frozen cake for her daughter's 4th birthday.

I immediately took to Pinterest to see what was out there.  It's harder than you might think to recreate a familiar character out of sugar dough, so I knew I needed to keep it pretty simple, kind of along these lines.  No handmade Anna and Elsa characters from this girl, I'm not that good.  (I mean, seriously, LOOK at this cake!  That is made out of sugar!) 

After some discussion, we netted out on a small (6-inch) cake for their small (6-person) party, with a handmade fondant Olaf on top, flanked by store-bought Anna and Elsa figurines.  Surely we could find a couple of cheap and cheerful figurines at Toys R Us to top off the cake, no problem.

Rookie mistake.

Store-bought toys from the biggest animated film of all time?

No dice.

Nothing at Toys R Us.  Nothing at Target.  Wal-Mart.  Even the Disney Store was stocked out!  Apparently people are paying thousands of dollars on eBay for Frozen stuff.

Disney really hit this movie out of the park, but it seems like no one in their supply chain got the memo.

Anyway, with no Anna and Elsa to steal the spotlight, Olaf was free to revel in his own personal flurry, all on his own!

I did end up printing out a stock photo of Anna and Elsa and mounting it on thin cardboard so the family could prop it up next to the cake while they sang Happy Birthday.  I don't know any four-year-olds who wouldn't love to see their beloved characters standing right there next to their cake.  (I forgot to take a picture though, before I sent the cake off on its merry way.)

Frozen madness notwithstanding, my favorite thing about this cake is that it is totally for a little girl.  Underneath that fondant ice and snow lies glossy pink strawberry buttercream (and the scent of strawberry oil wafting through my kitchen was mesmerizing).

The lighting is a bit dark, but here's the cake, just before I laid on the blue fondant:

Happy 4th birthday, Alexandra!