Wheats and Sweets: Drunk Barbie- pink champagne and strawberry cake

Its been a while! I have been baking but not blogging, trying to get back into it. This cake was for my friend Jen, she was having a champagne party for her birthday so I knew I had to get champagne in there somewhere. I found it pretty hard to find a champagne cake recipe that wasn't American, so had to convert from cups etc which is a bit annoying, luckily I got some lovely russian doll measuring cups from my friend Lyndsey for my birthday so this will not be a problem in the future!

This was the basic recipe I used, I doubled this as I wanted Barbie to have an extra puffy skirt.

Ingredients2 cups (240 g) cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
4 egg whites
¾ teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1⅓ cup (267 g) sugar
1⅓ cup pink champagne
red or pink food coloring

I bought the pinkest cava possible which will usually coincidentally be the cheapest, got to drink the rest of the bottle which is always a bonus. I found some american style sprinkles and so baked them into the sponge too to add a little extra tackiness, you need the long waxy american style ones as otherwise they just melt away into nothing! The barbie was really cheap (though doesnt she have amazing hair?), I pulled her legs off so now there are a pair of barbie legs floating around out kitchen which is a bit creepy...

Pre amputation, I made her bodice by sticking sugar pearls straight onto some royal icing.

I made a strawberry buttercream by folding in some really nice strawberry jam into a basic buttercream, I then layered the cakes up with that and some fresh strawberries. I also soaked the sponge in a bit more Cava as the booziness had pretty much baked out of the sponge- this is never a good thing!

Do you like her little hair net? Pre-shaping, the dress is a bit too 80's

Dress shaped and a little more princessy

I coloured and rolled out some fondant to cover her dress, I used a pizza cutter to trim the fondant into a circle and cut a little strip out to fit it round her body.

Actually covering the whole cake with the barbie in situ was quite hard, I had rolled the fondant really thin as I hate when its really thick-not nice to eat. Being so thin it did start to tear a bit and I struggled to get a clean finish around the barbie. This is the reason I never want to be paid to make cakes, I am not too bothered about little things like cracks in the icing but if I was paid it would really stress me out! I'll be sticking to my usual fee of a bottle of wine/some drinks.