D'lish Donut Shopkins Birthday Cake

Do you know what Shopkins are? If you have children then you might… if like me you are yet to become a parent then you can be excused for having absolutely no idea!

 

I’ve written before about the fantastic charity Free Cakes for Kids – I made a Rapunzel cake for a girl staying with her mum at a women’s shelter who otherwise wouldn’t have had a birthday cake.

 

Another request came through from the same group that I decided to volunteer for, for a child who would like a Shopkins cake, even though I didn’t know what that was. Shopkins turned out to be a collection of characters based on items you find in the supermarket – everything from cakes to fruit to a loaf of bread, bottle of bubble bath and even clothes and shoes. They have names like Suzie Sundaw, Mandy Candy and Angie Ankle Boot.

 

I browsed the website for a while until I was able to find a character I thought I could easily incorporate into a cake and remembered I had a giant doughnut cake mould I bought in the sale ages ago and had never used. There is a Shopkins character called D’lish Donut that looks like a pink iced ring doughnut with sprinkles (and of course arms, legs and a face) which I thought would be perfect.

 

The mould comes in two pieces - simply grease them and fill with cake mix.

 

I used a standard Victoria sponge cake recipe for this cake – as it was for a child, I wanted to avoid strong flavours or making it too rich and thought that the icing would be sugary enough!

 

 

 

 I filled the cake with jam and buttercream – the cake mould worked perfectly, turning out the bake cake into a perfect ring doughnut shape.

 

 

 

It wasn’t too hard to decorate – I decided water icing with pink food colouring might be too runny and not look very neat so I coloured some white roll-out fondant, cut it into a  circle large enough to go over the cake and cut a space in the middle. The arms and legs are also made of fondant, and I used some tiny plunger cutters to cut out diamonds from pink, blue and yellow fondant, and stuck them with a dab of water on top to look like sprinkles.

 

The eyes took a couple of attempts and my husband actually ended up helping with these! We made four circles of diminishing size in white, blue, black and white, and layered them to make the eyes. I then used black fondant to make a nose and some eyelashes and pink fondant for the mouth.
 

 

I put the cake onto a silver board and at the last minute decided to spell out the little girl’s name with leftover icing. I had a lovely email afterwards from the charity co-ordinator saying she had been really pleased with her cake – it was fun for me to make a cake for a child and to copy a cartoon character as I don’t get a lot of opportunity to do that (my neice is 8 months old so too young for cake) – and of course I was able to do something good and help a charity that hopefully made a difference and helped that little girl have a happy birthday.