Birthday cake sculpted to look like a real dog

Elisa Strauss of Confetti Cakes has created an amazingly life-like rendition of her father’s dog, Joey, as a birthday cake for him on his 60th birthday.

At first, I thought the cake was really cool, but then I thought about how if this was my dog, I’d be really weirded out because in a couple of minutes, I’ll be feasting on him (in a sense). Still, the cake of Joey really is quite remarkable.

Elisa explains her process below.

For my dad’s cake we started with our Old-fashioned Vanilla Cake and Vanilla Buttercream, (the recipes are in our book) split and filled 10-inch round cakes. Stacked them, carved them, and took the cakes apart to dowel so it was structurally sound. After the cake was sculpted I “crumb coated” the cake, which means I sealed in all the crumbs with a layer of buttercream. I made the head by carving styrofoam, because we had to drive the cake to my parents’ house and I wasn’t taking any chances. Then we covered the cakes with a mixture of white chocolate and vanilla rolled fondant. The plastic wrap and towels around the cake are to keep the icing from drying it. It took a long time to make all that fur!

Elisa has posted a 4 minute video of her creating the cake. The video is filmed over 4 days.
I hate it when people don’t allow their videos to be embedded. So stupid.

Joey the cake next to Joey the dog

There are more photos of the real dog and the cake dog in this Flickr photoset.