The Ultimate Disney Frozen Cake
This three-layered amazing Frozen cake is inspired by Disney’s Frozen II, and is sure to bring some magic to any family or birthday celebration with homemade Anna, Elsa, and Olaf cake toppers! Follow the step-by-step instructions to make everything from the cake to the vegan fondant for a magically winter cake!
Disney’s Frozen Cake inspired by Frozen II
If you know me, then you know I’m quite obsessed with Disney’s Frozen and Frozen II. Especially Frozen II. In fact, if you follow me on Instagram, then I’m quite often sketching and painting the Frozen characters.
If I wasn’t a baker, I’d be a Disney animator. That’s truly my dream job! But I also love making cakes and treats and bringing joy to people’s kitchens and bellies 🙂 So I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing 😉
Because I feel like we all need a little more magic in our lives right now, I decided to make a Frozen birthday cake! This might actually be my favorite cake I’ve ever made.
And it’s entirely vegan, gluten free, and dairy free. Yes, even the fondant Frozen cake toppers of Elsa, Anna, and Olaf! Now, you don’t have to make this vegan, but seeing as I’m a vegan baker, and I love making vegan treats that taste as good, if not better, than the conventional, I highly recommend making this cake as is.
For this Frozen cake, I made a deliciously light and moist vegan vanilla cake, all coated in my super simple vegan buttercream frosting. Then I topped the cake with homemade Anna, Elsa, and Olaf fondant figurines and dairy free white chocolate Christmas trees and snowflakes!
This Disney-inspired cake is sure to amaze and impress any child and/or adult. It’s super fun to make, and by following the step by step instructions below, you’ll have a Frozen masterpiece to wow a crowd!
If you’re looking for Frozen cake ideas, then definitely try out this cake!
How to make a Frozen Birthday Cake
I will say that this Frozen themed cake does take some time and patience, but it’s really not hard. It’s just about doing things in steps!
For the actual cake base, I used my classic vegan vanilla cake. It really is the best dang vanilla cake I’ve ever had. I recommend using vanilla paste in the cake as well, because then you get these beautiful specs of vanilla seeds in the actual cake layers.
Just beautiful!
The full cake ingredients and instructions are listed down below in the recipe card. However, the basic ingredients list is:
- Flour: you can use gluten-free 1:1 baking flour here as needed!
- Sugar: you can keep this Frozen cake refined sugar free too by using coconut sugar
- Dairy free milk and apple cider vinegar: this creates the vegan buttermilk
- Unsweetened applesauce: this replaces eggs in a regular vanilla cake recipe
- Melted vegan butter or coconut oil: you can use either here!
- Vanilla extract: we are really using 2 tablespoons here. Trust me, it’s worth it!
Then for the frosting and cake toppers you’ll need:
- Vegan butter
- Powdered sugar: sifted, or else you’ll get clumps in both your frosting and the vegan fondant!
- Vegan food coloring: I recommend Nomeca, which you can purchase on Amazon, for high quality fun vegan food colors
- Vegan White Chocolate: for the trees and the snowflakes
Once you’ve gathered your ingredients, it’s time to make the actual Frozen cake!
I recommend breaking this Frozen cake up into a few steps. And please note that if you’re making the vegan fondant, I recommend making that first before the cake!
- Make the vegan fondant decorations
- Bake the cake
- Frost the cake
- Make the white chocolate trees and snowflakes
- Decorate the cake
Bake the cake
Making this vegan vanilla cake is as simple as any other cake recipe!
All you’ll need to do is whisk together the dry ingredients, add in the room temperature wet ingredients, pour into your cake pans, and bake.
You can make this cake into an 8″ three-layered Frozen cake, as I did, or a 6″ three or four-layered cake. You can also use 9″ cake pans too, but keep in mind that the baking times might vary. Just keep an eye on the cake using the oven light occasionally!
Frost the cake
Once the cake is fully cooled (and I really do mean fully cooled- you don’t want the cake to slip and slide onto the ground!), then you can begin making the frosting.
We’ll do a crumb coat layer and then the full frosting layer. We’re using my easy vegan buttercream recipe here for the frosting. I recommend using about half of the vegan buttercream for the crumb coat layer (this means frosting the middle layers and a scraping of frosting around the sides to lock in the crumbs).
Then you can divide the remaining frosting into three bowls, and color two of them light pink and light blue.
For the water-color effect, I spoon a few globs of pink frosting around the cake, then filled in the gaps with the blue. Use a bench scraper to carefully smooth the frosting, then use any remaining frosting to create the swoops.
The white frosting will be for the top of the cake! I used a spoon again to create swoops like little snow moguls.
Frozen Cake Topper
Of course, you can leave your cake as is with the pretty colors, or you can jazz it up a bit to be a real Frozen birthday cake.
I wanted to really create a scene, so I made little Christmas trees out of vegan white chocolate, along with snowflakes, and fondant Frozen cake toppers!
For the vegan white chocolate, I used Pascha Organics vegan white chocolate chips. They actually taste just like white chocolate in my opinion. I simply mixed in some vegan food coloring to create those pretty pinks and blues.
You can also use homemade vegan white chocolate!
But if you’re like me, then you’ll want to go all out and make the vegan fondant decorations as well to make this truly an Elsa and Anna cake.
Or maybe you want to make it just an Olaf cake, and use the fondant to make a rather large Olaf! The choice is all yours!
How to make vegan fondant
The full fondant recipe is found down below in the recipe card, but essentially, it’s not much different than any other classic fondant recipe, except for one thing.
It’s vegan!!
Didn’t think vegan fondant was a thing? Think again! Because vegan marshmallows have gotten so good these days (honestly they taste just like regular marshmallows to me, I don’t know how Dandie’s does it!), the vegan marshmallow fondant works in just the same way that regular marshmallow fondant does.
For vegan marshmallow fondant, you’ll need:
- Vegan marshmallows: such as Dandies or Trader Joe’s
- Water
- Powdered sugar: please make sure it’s sifted, or you’ll get clumps in your fondant!
- Coconut oil or shortening: this is to grease your hands so that the fondant doesn’t stick everywhere!
- Vegan food coloring: for fun vegan colors, I recommend Nomeca
The full process for making the fondant is down below in the recipe card. Essentially you’ll just melt the marshmallows with the water, and knead in the powdered sugar.
It takes a bit of arm work, but making fondant is actually quite easy, and really fun.
Plus, then you can make cute Frozen cake toppers, like these ones I made based off of Elsa, Anna, and Olaf!
How I made Elsa, Anna, and Olaf
Truthfully, I sort of just winged it! There are many YouTube tutorials on how to make fondant figurines, and I’d highly recommend checking that out.
Mine aren’t perfect, but I also wanted them to be cute and definitely not cookie-cutter replicas of my favorite Disney characters. So I went in with the mindset that a kid often has with a big batch of play dough (that was my favorite!): just have fun with it!
You don’t have to use the fondant to make figurines out of the characters. In fact, you can use the vegan fondant to make snowflakes using a snowflake cookie press, or even color the fondant and use that as a cleaner looking outside of the cake than frosting.
This Frozen birthday cake is all yours to decorate! And that’s the best part, so have fun with it!
I hope you love this Frozen cake as much as I do! If you make it, let me know how it goes for you down below in the comments section, as well as giving it a rating so that others may find it.
As always, I absolutely love to see your beautiful creations on Instagram and Pinterest, so be sure to tag me there!
Happy Frozen cake baking and decorating!
More vegan birthday cake ideas
Secretly Vegan Harry Potter Cake
Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake
Want to save this recipe for later? Add it to your favorite recipe board on Pinterest!
The Ultimate Disney Frozen Cake
- Prep Time: 60
- Cook Time: 30
- Total Time: 240
- Yield: 18 1x
- Category: Dessert
- Method: Baking
- Cuisine: American
- Diet: Vegan
Description
This three-layered amazing Frozen cake is inspired by Disney’s Frozen II, and is sure to bring some magic to any family or birthday celebration with homemade Anna, Elsa, and Olaf cake toppers! Follow the step-by-step instructions to make everything from the cake to the vegan fondant for a magically winter cake!
Ingredients
- 3 1/2 cups organic flour or gluten free 1-to-1 baking flour, sifted (do NOT skip- add in 1 tsp arrowroot powder if using gluten free 1-to-1 baking flour, see Note)
- 1 1/4 cup cane sugar or coconut sugar (see Note)
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp finely ground sea salt
- 1 1/2 cup unsweetened dairy free milk, room temperature
- 2 tsp apple cider vinegar (to be mixed with coconut/almond milk)
- 3/4 cup unsweetened applesauce, room temperature
- 1/3 cup coconut oil or vegan butter, melted, see notes for oil free
- 2 tbsp vanilla extract (yes, tablespoons!)
Vegan Vanilla Buttercream:
- 2 cups vegan butter, softened
- 5–6 cups organic powdered sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2–4 tbsp unsweetened dairy free milk
Vegan Fondant
- 8 ounces vegan marshmallows
- 4 cups powdered sugar, sifted
- 2 tbsp water
- Vegan food coloring
- 1/2 cup coconut oil or shortening
Vegan White Chocolate Christmas Trees:
- 1 cup vegan white chocolate or store bought vegan white chocolate chips (such as Pascha)
- Vegan food coloring
- Toothpicks or dowels
Instructions
*If you’re making the vegan fondant Elsa, Ana, and Olaf, I recommend making those first before you begin the cake.
Vegan Vanilla Cake:
- Preheat the oven to 350F and grease three 8″ cake pans with olive or coconut oil and line with parchment paper.
- Add apple cider vinegar to unsweetened coconut/almond milk and set aside.
- In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar baking powder, baking soda and sea salt. Set aside.
- In a medium bowl, add dairy free milk and apple cider vinegar mixture, coconut oil, applesauce, and vanilla together. Mix until thoroughly combined.
- Pour wet ingredients into dry and stir until there are no more clumps of batter. If your cake batter looks a little dry, you can add in by the tablespoon a little more coconut or almond milk.
- Divid the batter evenly into the cake pans.
- Place cake pans into the oven and bake for 27-30 minutes, or until the toothpick comes out clean.
- Let the cakes cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then transfer them to a drying rack to cool completely before frosting.
Vegan Vanilla Buttercream:
- When ready to frost the cakes, add vegan butter to a large bowl and beat together with a hand mixer.
- Add in 1 cup of powdered sugar at a time, continuing the beat the mixture until it’s a thick buttercream.
- Add in vanilla and 2-4 tablespoons of coconut/almond milk and continue to beat until desired texture.
- Use about half of the frosting to frost the middle layers of the cake and create a crumb coat as the first layer of frosting. This includes just a scraping of icing around the sides of the cake to lock in any crumbs. Place the cake into the fridge to chill while you create the colors for the sides of the cake.
- Divide the frosting into 3 bowls. One bowl is for the pink frosting, one for the blue, and one will remain white. Mix in the colors accordingly.
- To frost the cake, use an offset spatula or spoon to add large spoonfuls of pink frosting to the sides at random around the cake. Then fill in the spaces with the blue frosting. Use a bench scraper to gently blend the colors. Then use any remaining pink and blue frosting to create swoops around the cake sides with the back of your spoon.
- Use the white frosting to frost the top of the cake. Then place the cake back into the fridge to set for 20 minutes.
Vegan Fondant:
- If you’re making the fondant as cake decorations, I recommend doing this first. In a microwave safe bowl, heat the marshmallows and water until melted (in 30 second intervals- it takes me about two intervals, so 1 minute total).
- Once melted, add in 2 cups sifted powdered sugar (this is important as you don’t want clumps in your fondant) and carefully use a spoon to mix the powdered sugar into the fondant. It won’t mix fully, but just enough so that it’s beginning the process of integrating.
- Grease a clean surface and your hands generously with the shortening or coconut oil. Place the fondant onto the surface, and add the remaining powdered sugar. Continue to grease your hands generously to prevent the fondant from sticking to you while kneading. Knead until the powdered sugar is fully incorporated into the fondant.
- Divide the fondant into various sections and add food coloring as you desire. I recommend working on one character at a time. Alternatively, you can roll out the fondant and use fondant stamps to create snowflakes, etc.
Vegan White Chocolate Christmas Trees:
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and make sure you have about 6 toothpicks or dowels and 3 piping bags
- In a microwave safe bowl, melt the white chocolate in intervals of 30 seconds, stirring in between each interval. You don’t want the chocolate melted fully in the microwave. After the second round, you should be able to stir the chocolate and melt it fully in the bowl.
- Separate the white chocolate into 3 bowls: one for pink, one for blue, and one for white. Spoon the plain white chocolate into a piping bag, cut the end of the piping bag, and pipe snowflakes onto the parchment paper.
- Then mix in the pink food coloring to one bowl and the blue to another. Fill another piping bag with pink white chocolate, snip the end, and pipe in a zig zag over the down to create a Christmas tree. Repeat for two more dowels, varying the size of the trees. Then repeat the same process for the blue white chocolate.
- Place the baking sheet into the freezer to set for 15 minutes.
- Decorate your Frozen cake as you’d like!
Notes
- Make sure that you add in a tsp of arrowroot powder or cornstarch if using gluten free 1-to-1 baking flour. This will give the flour more like a cake flour texture when baked- very tender and moist!
- If you use coconut sugar, your cake will be slightly tanner in color- but still delicious!!
- For oil free version, swap in an equal amount of unsweetened applesauce for the coconut oil.
This may be my favorite frozen cake ever. I love the rustic look of it. As a cake decorator myself, I’m awfully tired of all the picture perfect cakes everybody wants nowadays.