I Made a Dog Shaped Cake!

Dog Shaped Cake from Martha Stewart

I don’t bake often and the only thing I bake is oatmeal raisin cookies.  Although, I haven’t done that in years.  However, for Valentine’s Day, I decided to try and make a dog shaped cake for Jasen.  He likes dogs, thus the dog shaped cake.  Plus it would be something fun and different.  Monica actually helped me come up with the idea and helped me with it too.

There are a lot of different dog shaped cakes out there on the internet.  I wanted to find one that was relatively simple to make and cute.  I came across this dog shaped cake from Martha Stewart and decided to go with it.  It’s pretty darn cute!  Monica came up with a great idea on making a much simpler frosting instead of the buttercream.  It was simply cool whip mixed with a pack of vanilla instant pudding mix, and a teaspoon or so of vanilla extract!  It was much lighter and ended up being thick enough.

I used funfetti cake mix instead of making cake from scratch because funfetti is fun and making cake from scratch would take way too long!  Baked the cake and let it cool, then the fun part came.  I had to slice the cake in half horizontally.  Little did I know, the cake wasn’t that thick to begin with so I was left with two very thin slices of cake.  The recipe came with cutouts so that made it easier.

Dog Cake Cutout

As I was cutting the pieces out to make the dog, I thought about how some people do this for a living!  Making cakes like this.  Which was a bit crazy to think of cause it does take quite a bit of effort.  I also realized a large amount of cake goes to waste from cutting out shapes.  You’re left with scraps.  I mean, imagine cutting out the paper into shapes and the amount of scraps you’d end up with.  Same thing with the cake.  You can only eat so much scrap cake…

I realized there was a slight problem after I cut out the pieces.  The legs of the dog were cut out horizontally on the cake which means it was really wide.  And the head was really big.  So the cake shape was huge!  I didn’t have any container to hold such a large cake.  All I had was a pyrex with a lid that I wanted it to fit in.  I had to trim the cake quite a bit to fit into the pyrex since I wanted to make it vertical as well.

As we (Monica and I) got ready to put the frosting on, I also realized that the pastry bags I bought didn’t come with a piping tip.  I totally thought it did which was the whole point of buying it.  Luckily, we were able to do without.  We went about adding the little “sheep” coat on the dog which was fun.  Threw on plain M&Ms for the eyes and claws on the paws and a single peanut M&M for the nose.  And we were done!

Cut Sheep Dog Cake

An interesting part of this whole project was how to actually get the cake to Jasen on Valentine’s Day.  I made this cake the night before and ended up bringing it to work and sticking it in the work fridge.  I had to set several alarms to make sure I remembered to take it when I left!  Our reservations for dinner weren’t until 6pm and I got off work around 3pm.  My original plan was to drop it off at his house after work and befor dinner.  Luckily I didn’t since traffic was really bad already and I probably wouldn’t have made it back for dinner.  I ended up getting a bag of ice from work and putting it on top of the cake while it sat in my car.  lol.  Success, it was still nice and cold after dinner.  Haha.  I was also afraid the cake would get all soggy because of all the frosting on the thin cake.  That also didn’t happen.  It ended up tasting pretty good even if I say so myself.  He liked it.  Haha.

After being slightly afraid that this might be a “Pinterest Fail”, I’m happy to say that I Nailed it!

Dog Shaped Cake Success! Nailed it!