Doc McStuffins Clinic Cake

I try to put a lot of energy into doing really ambitious cakes for my kids' own birthdays. This weekend we were celebrating my daughter Darcy's 4th birthday. She's a big, big fan of Doc McStuffins and asked for a Doc McStuffins' themed cake. I decided to attempt to make her clinic.

Sadly this is one of the occasions where I was really disappointed with the result, though it took me about six solid hours of work to do the thing. I think I just came out looking a bit sloppy and not at all how I envisioned. Lucky for me she is four and easily impressed.

A little side note: For a while now I've been using Dr Oetker cake release spray. I think this stuff is brilliant, my cakes don't stick at all, they come out of the tin like a dream. My local tesco appears to have stopped stocking it so I ordered some from The Craft Company. Now there is a bit of a post-office mix up which involved the Craft Company's customer service doing their absolute best and Royal Mail blowing up a parcel, but long story short I had cakes to make and no cake release spray yet. I got the husband to call into the craft store in town to see if they sold it. They didn't but they did stock PME Release a Cake. Now maybe I was doing something wrong but I found this stuff to be absolutely dreadful. Two cakes in a row ended up with half of stuck to the bottom of the tin so when I turned them out great hulking wedges of cake were torn from the centre. I was NOT impressed. Thankfully a day later the Dr Oetker spray arrived and balance was restored to the universe, and the PME Release-a-Cake swiftly went into the bin.