A birthday cake for Little Miss

Little Miss was born on New Year's day four years ago. This year she wanted a princess cake, which is no mean feat for someone who isn't skilled at cake decoration (I'm not enough of a perfectionist!). I leafed through a few cake decorating books and pooled some ideas to do this:

I was in too much of a rush to make one of those gorgeous step by step tutorials (as usual!). But if you're interested, this is what I did:

1. I made a cake in a ring mould. It didn't come out as tall as I needed it ( I thought it would come up to Barbie's waist but it reached her knees!), but that didn't stop me.

2. Once the cake had cooled completely, I wrapped Barbie's legs in greaseproof paper and shove them into the hole in the middle of the ring cake. I stuffed more greaseproof in the hole to secure her. You could use foil or baking parchment instead, I just had greaseproof.

3. I folded another piece of greaseproof paper and then wrapped it round Barbie's waist and secured it with sellotape. It then looked like she had a greaseproof skirt for the ball, which wasn't quite glamorous enough for my 4 year old, so I kept going...

4. There's a fantastic haberdasher's in town, so I bought some pink sparkly netting folded it in two and wrapped in round Barbie's greaseproof skirt. At this point I thought of getting the needle and thread out but I only hade half an hour before the guests were to arrive, so out came the sellotape again. I taped the back of the skirt up and tied it to Barbie's waist with a bit of wired gold ribbon I had in my stash.

5. I found some ver regal looking candles and stuck them in some sweets that i put in front of the cake. That was it. Easy and quick and it drew some oohs and ahhs from all the little girls who saw it. Perfect!