This post may contain affiliate links. See our disclosure policy.
This Disney Princess Cake is every little princess’s dream come true! Transform Elsa, Rapunzel, or any other Disney princess into a magical birthday cake!
Featured with this recipe
Instead of buying an expensive Disney princess cake, you can make your own at home! It’s so easy and doesn’t take any more time than a regular birthday cake. Dress up Ariel, Cinderella, Tiana, Aurora, Elsa, Anna, Rapunzel or any other Disney princess these easy techniques. Use your favorite piping tips to create your own dress design. Be creative! Your little princess will love it!
What You Need for a Disney Princess Cake
- Disney princess Barbie doll
- Box cake mix, prepared
- You can also use our homemade cake mix recipe if you don’t want to use store-bought. This easy recipe just uses cake flour (or all purpose flour), sugar, baking powder, salt, and shortening. Add eggs, milk, and butter to the mixture to make your cake batter.
- Buttercream frosting
- 8″ baking pans
- Oven-safe, dome-shaped mixing bowl
- Stand mixer or hand mixer
How to Make the Cake Skirt/Dress
- Find your “molds”. The “skirt” of the cake is baked in one or two 8″ cake pans and a glass bowl (or two glass bowls, one medium-sized and one small sized). That’s all you’ll need for the base of the cake, or the skirt. Get creative with what you have. Just make sure the bowls you are using are oven safe. A ceramic or stoneware mixing bowl will work great. The size of cake will fit any Barbie-size princess doll or Barbie doll.
- Make and bake the cakes. Mix two box mixes of cake mix (you can mix and match or use all one flavor, totally up to you. Following the directions in the recipe card below, bake cake according to package instructions. To avoid sticking, grease or butter your pans and then lightly dust with flour before adding the batter. Tip: Use any excess batter to make cupcakes
- Cool and flip. About 10 minutes after removing from the oven, flip the round cakes and/or bowls over and release the cakes from the pans and/or bowls. You may need to gently slip a knife around the edges to loosen, and then invert onto a wire cooling rack. This way the cakes can finish cooling and you will avoid the cake sweating and sticking to the bowl.
- Stack the layers. Stack the cakes one on top of the other, with the larger one on the bottom, then trim off the excess to make a full skirt. You may want to cut the cakes in half horizontally and add frosting in between the layers to add more height.
- Freeze and frost. I usually like to wrap the whole cake in plastic wrap and pop it in the freezer overnight after it has cooled. This makes it so much easier to frost later on. Insert doll into the top of the cake (you may want to use a knife to cut a hole the width of the Barbie doll if it is still fairly frozen) and decorate
What Frosting is Best?
I love using our homemade buttercream frosting or fondant when I am decorating cakes with beautiful detail like these princess cakes. Fondant is great to get the smooth, flowy look. Buttercream frosting holds its shape well and it is easy to pipe so you can do all kinds of fun designs for your Disney princess cake. You will want about 6-7 cups of frosting to cover your cake if you are wanting to pipe the entire cake. This allows for some extra for dividing and color mixing.
How to Decorate a Princess Cake
- Lightly frost the cake before piping or decorating. This is called a “crumb coat”. It adds strength to the cake once the decorating icing is applied and keeps unwanted crumbs from being seen.
- Prep your piping bags with the colors and tips you are going to use. I have found that big tips are my friend when it comes for frosting a princess Barbie cake. You can get pretty designs without having to pipe lots of individual stars. The Elsa cake (below) was less time consuming than the Rapunzel cake (also below).
- You can also use fondant or marzipan to decorate the cake like with our Barbie cake recipe. Just roll it out thin and cover the cake.
- Add sprinkles, edible sugar pearls, and other decorations.
Tips for Decorating
- Clip up the doll’s hair or any accessories while decorating.
- Use a cake plate or lazy Susan when decorating. This will make it easier to turn while piping.
- Separate your frosting into bowls, color with food coloring, then cover with a damp cloth until ready to use so the frosting doesn’t dry out.
- Practice piping on wax paper until you get comfortable creating your designs. Here is a great post on some simple piping techniques to try.
- Use gel food coloring from the craft store. These types of food coloring are far superior to the water food coloring at the grocery story. You will get brighter colors and the perfect tint to match your princess.
- If you find your buttercream frosting is too thin, add powdered sugar a little at a time.
- Get creative with decorations! You can use sprinkles or any shape or size, piping gels, or any other fun sugary ingredients you can find. You can also use fresh raspberries but make sure they are very dry so they don’t bleed onto your cake.
Disney Elsa Cake
For the Elsa Barbie doll birthday cake we used a Barbie that had a painted on body and a skirt (instead of a full dress). This made it super easy to decorate. We mixed Sky Blue and Lavender food coloring to get the right colors. We kept adding color a drop at a time until it matched Elsa’s bodice colors.
For the skirt, we did 2 colors. The top color was more heavy on the blue and the bottom was heavier on the lavender color. To get the “hombre” look, we filled one pastry bag with the blue, another one with the purple and then put BOTH bags (no tips in either bag) in one bag with the star tip. That way the two colors combined without mixing too much. It gave it more of a swirled look.
We used a star tip to make the “swirls” and alternated the direction of each swirl to give it more interest. You could also probably do rosettes and it would look beautiful. We finished off the look with pearl sprinkles and sparkly snowflake foam stickers (of course, we removed the stickers before eating).
Disney Rapunzel Cake
For the Rapunzel cake, we mostly piped little flowers using a small star tip. We used a flat tip for the ribbon on the front of the dress and a larger star tip for the “shell” looking border along the bottom.
Frequently Asked Questions
A princess doll cake feeds 10-12 people.
First, you want to coat the cake with a layer of icing so the piping has something to stick to. Then, You can use a large star tip to make swirls or pipe flowers along the cake. You can also use a ribbon tip to make ruffles or give the dress a ruched look.
Princess doll cakes can range from anywhere from $40-$75 depending on the demand where you live. Because they are so easy to make, we have never actually bought one from the store. We always make it!
Read Next: 33+ Easy Dessert Ideas
More Fun Cake Recipes
Disney Princess Cake
Video
Equipment
- 8 inch Baking Pan
- Mixing Bowls
- Hand Mixer
Ingredients
- 2 cake mixes made according to package directions
- 1 Disney Princess Barbie doll
- 6 cups vanilla or buttercream frosting
Instructions
- In a large bowl, make up cake batter for both cake mixes. *Optional – for a more dense and moist cake substitute half of the water for the same amount of sour cream.Grease and flour an 8" pan and a ceramic medium oven-safe bowl or a medium-sized and small glass oven-safe bowl (see notes above). Spray pans with cooking spray (or grease with butter) and dust lightly with flour. Turn upside-down and tap the bowl to get rid of excess flour.
- Fill with batter until they are a little over ¾ full. Use remaining batter for cup cakes.Bake at 325 for about an hour or until the center feels set (checking after 30 minutes). If you are using a cake pan for one of the layers, check after 20 minutes.
- About 10 minutes after you remove the cake from the oven, turn out of bowl onto wax paper. This prevents the cake from sweating and sticking to the bowl.Stick the cakes in the freezer for a few hours or overnight until they are really firm. Layer the small cake onto the large cake and trim any over hang.
- Stick your Barbie princess in the center of the cake and frost over her upper half to make it look like a dress.
- Layer with a thin layer of frosting to create a "crumb coat".
- Make frosting (see link above) and decorate.
Notes
- Nutrition represents a standard white cake mix with buttercream frosting. Nutritional values of other flavors may vary.
- If you would rather make the dress with fondant, you can use our fondant recipe instead.
- Use extra batter to make cupcakes and place them around the base of the cake, this looks especially pretty if you have the princess cake up on a raised cake plate.
