BOSTON TERRIER BIRTHDAY CAKE

Hello, everyone!  It's been quite a year and this is LONG overdue!  I set myself up for a little challenge this past August (10th to be exact) and decided to make a Boston Terrier Birthday Cake for my then Fiance, Mike.  This may not sound so challenging to you cake makers out there BUUUT he only likes STORE BOUGHT CAKE.  That includes ICING.  This is QUITE the challenge for an at home baker and also the biggest slap in the face.    Yes, it's easy and also tasty but I am constantly asking him to just TRY a cake from scratch.  He loves my other baked goodies... I guess you love what you know.

To make this cake I literally just decided to WING it.  I do this often and I fail... A LOT.  This time... It worked (at least I think so).  It helped that my muse was begging at my feet the ENTIRE time so I ws able to look down and go off of Oliver's face (my boston terrier) when I needed to.

As you can see  I actually baked 1 chocolate sheet cake, 1 vanilla round, and some  vanilla cupcakes as well from the same batch.  It was just Mike and I celebrating his birthday so I didn't feel the need to make the cake any larger.  Otherwise, I would have made 2 sheet cakes to build up off of.  You'll see what I mean later.  These cakes are completely cooled.

Now that I have my basic shapes I need to think about how this is going to look like MAH DAWG!  Where do I cut?  What do I leave? It's pretty simple.

Here's Oliver posing/begging.  See how I cut the circle?  I then took a part of it and pieced it up the head just like on Oliver.  I made sure that Any part that would be WHITE ICING was made with Yellow Cake (the store literally had NO WHITE CAKE... Seriously.)  See how it's not perfect?  I'm cool with that.  My dog is weird looking so the cake should be too.  Right about now though I was a little worried because I thought the cake looked like a bear.

After some fretting... I drank some wine, cut out the ears, scaled down the head, and slapped in a mouth. Oliver just sat there.  For the Nose I drew a template on paper, cut it out, then traced around it with a sharp knife.  BOOM, Done.

When icing the cake remember you can always throw it in the fridge for a few minutes to make it not so melty and runny.  I didn't buy enough chocolate icing (ANNOYING) so I had to use all of my black and some other colors to create that black you see there to the white icing.  To make it all stretch a little further I did put them into my mixer which fluffed them and doubled the amount in each container.  

The eye is off to the side on purpose.  It is also an odd shape on purpose as Oliver has weird eyeballs.

Here I used piping bags for the details on his face.  For the "Happy Birthday" and the bone up top... Yeah, that little disaster... I had run out of everything.  I had some of those ready write gel tube  things that I had never used... I gave them a whirl.  They really bite the big one.  I found that microwaving them in increments helped to get things going but I threw them out immediately after this.

Mike- The Birthday Man!  Apparently this is what
you get when you turn 38 in our house.

My dog is missing some face! See... You could do more layers underneath!  Yes, Mike ate the entire thing.  So not fair.

This is the recipe I followed for the cake.  You MUST ADAPT THE CAKE BATTER.    Found it on CakeCentral.com

I didn't use Duncan Hines cake.  I have used this recipe many times from Cake Central.  It's what I used for the beer pong cake and the ear cake as well.  It always does the trick.  The difference with those cakes is that I am able to use buttercream and fondant....

What do you do with your egg yolks?  I cook them up for Oliver.  He's so spoiled.

My blogs should start coming more regularly now that I am a married woman... No wedding planning to get in the way!  If you would like to see what I did for my wedding and or some ideas check out kakiewedding.com