Food Network Star Molly Yeh Has Her Own Take on Ikea’s Princess Cakes and They’re Almost Too Cute to Eat
Want to eat Ikea’s food without actually going there? It’s possible. Get the taste of Ikea’s princess cakes at home with celebrity chef Molly Yeh’s mini cakes. The confection from the Swedish furniture retailer inspired the Girl Meets Farm host to create Mini Strawberry Princess Cakes.
Molly Yeh’s mini cakes take 3 hours to make
The Food Network star’s mini cakes are a labor of love. They take a little over three hours to make from start to finish, according to Food Network’s instructions. However, just because they’re time-consuming doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all that challenging to prepare.
As Yeh once noted on her My Name Is Yeh blog, even she gets lost reading princess cake recipes.
“I’ve read a few recipes for princess cakes. They involve gelatin sheets and syrups and all sorts of steps that kind of jumble all together on the page and get lost in my one-track marzipan mind,” she said.
“When I eat the mini princess cakes at Ikea, I simply taste marzipan, cake, raspberry jam, whipped cream, and more marzipan,” she added. “So I winged these little guys to come up with a super easy solution that might not be the most authentic, but sure is amazingly tasty.”
So what’s her trick? Making a simple sheet cake, cutting it into circles with a biscuit cutter (a drinking glass will work too), and, finally, decorating with marzipan.
Yeh’s mini cakes start with 1 big sheet cake
Unlike her halva bars, Yeh’s Mini Strawberry Princess Cakes require more dishes and steps. To start, she mixes together the ingredients for a vanilla sheet cake. As Yeh once noted on her Food Network show, it’s important not to overmix the batter. Otherwise, the cake will become tough.
Once the batter is combined, the 32-year-old spreads the batter out on a sheet pan and bakes it. Here’s where a crucial step comes in. The cake can’t be warm when it gets cut into tiny circles. As Yeh explained on Girl Meets Farm, “it’s important that the cake is cooled. That way you get cleaner cuts.”
So once the cake has cooled and the circles have been cut out, Yeh spreads each one with a layer of jam and homemade whipped cream. Then they go in the freezer to firm up.
The ‘Girl Meets Farm’ host covers her mini cakes with marzipan and decorations
After the cakes have firmed up in the freezer it’s time for the marzipan. Yeh puts store-bought marzipan in three separate bowls before adding food coloring. What she’s left with is green, pink, and purple marzipan.
From there the cookbook author spreads thin purple discs of marzipan over each mini cake. Then she makes “little flat snakes” of marzipan before coiling each one to create marzipan roses. Lastly, she adds a few green marzipan “leaves.” The end result, according to Yeh, is fluffy, sweet, and almond-flavored cakes “worthy of royalty.”
