DORA CAKE TUTORIAL | FROZEN BUTTERCREAM TRANSFER

Two years back I knew nothing about neither baking nor cake decorations.It all started on  my daughter's second birthday when I baked my first cake ever (Princess cake).It is hard to get egg less cakes here with so many design specifications. One of my college friends suggested me to bake a cake on my own and also gave me a basic recipe. She encouraged me to decorate as I used to do lot of paintings during my college days.After that there was no looking back. For every occasion I take orders(??) from my kids with exact specifications. Usually we celebrate our kid's birthday only with family and close friends and have never thrown a party.So I normally tend to pay attention to their cake and food menu needs. For this year my daughter's specifications were

1) Dora cake but no boots or swiper along with her.

2) Dora should wear her red or purple fiesta dress

3) No fondant. Only lots of butter cream icing

4) Chocolate flavor

The idea of using icing for Dora dreaded me. Though I can do some decent pencil sketches, I could not think of it with icing.Luckily I came across this wonderful tutorial for icing the cake when I was searching for Dora cakes over the net.I gained some confidence and I started to do the Dora icing on her birthday (As a plan B I had a small Dora figurine to fix on the cake!).I followed the instructions as per the tutorial except that I did not use a glass as mentioned in the post.I just stapled a print out of Dora with wax paper and I was able to manage When I peeled the wax paper, the beautiful Dora amazed us.Yes it really worked. Now on to the tutorial

What you need:

9" chocolate cake

9" vanilla cake

Buttercream icing - I don't remember the measurement as I mixed as and when needed. All that I know is it took a quite a lot as piped roses on the sides with 1M Wilton tip

Procedure:

Bake the chocolate and vanilla cake. Remove the domes if there are any

Place the chocolate cake at the bottom.

Apply some icing over the chocolate cake

Place the vanilla cake

Crumb coat the cake and let it sit for sometime

Take a print of your favorite Dora picture/or any picture
Place a wax paper on top and staple it

Mix the colors that you need
Take the icing and first draw the details.For the details #1 round tip can be used.If you don't have that it is fine. Just use a normal zip lock bag with the corner cut to the desired length

Then apply the icing for the larger  layers (Remember this will be reversed.So the details that you applied in the previous step will come on top)

Make sure that the icing you applied is at least 1/4 inch thick.

I know that the icing will not look appealing at this stage. (My husband was teasing me that the Dora looks like ghost!). don't pay attention and put it in freezer along with wax paper. 

Chill for atleast 30 minutes or the icing is little hard to touch
Meanwhile work on the side decoration for the cake.

I used a 1M star tip to pipe roses which is a time saving frosting method(Refer to I am the baker for video tutorial)
Now take the wax paper and invert the design on top of the cake

Peel the wax paper.Viola the beautiful Dora is unveiled

Notes:

• Make sure the icing is hard when taking out of the freezer
• The design should be applied to the cake quickly before it softens. When I applied, Dora's right hand softened a little bit and it broke. But anyway I was able to fix this later
• The rosettes did not come out perfect for me.Maybe the buttercream that I prepared was too thin.Hope to get this better next time.

Later I came to know that this technique is called as Frozen Buttercream transfer.Refer to Wilton's site for the tutorial