The Pink Poodle Birthday Cake

This special 3rd birthday, I decided to get a little more creative than I normally do in regards to the cake.  Normally, I let my mother-in-law help me out with the cake, or we buy one, or we’ll just haphazardly decorate it by throwing some of their favorite toys onto it and writing Happy Birthday.  This time, however, we were flipping through an issue of Family Fun in a doctor’s waiting area and figured we could surely make this cake.

2 Cake Mixes – We used strawberry, so it would be all pink

2 Cans Pink Frosting

Coconut tinted pink with red food coloring (we used about 7 oz)

Red & Blue Fruit Leather (like Fruit Roll ups) to cut the tongue and eye out of

Whoppers (we only used one for the nose)

Hard Candy for the collar (We used Lifesavers)

2 8-9″ cake pans

Fill your cake pan about half full and bake.  Once cooled, take out of cake pan.  Leave one whole and the other, cut as shown:

Arrange your pieces so that they look like a dog.

 

Tint your coconut pink by putting a few drops of food coloring into your coconut.

Frost the cake pink and then pile the coconut on where you want it to look like it had recently been to the groomer.  Leaving a shaved space in the middle of the dog’s torso and tufts of “hair” at the bottoms of the feet.  Place the hard candy on for the collar and the tongue and eye made out of fruit leather in the appropriate places.  I cut eyelashes on the eye to make it look a bit more fancy.  Use the malt ball for the nose.

 

She was quite impressed!  and super excited!

and she knew just what to do with those candles……

It was a fun birthday!  My sister came with her 6 kids and 4 extras that she was keeping for the weekend.  The 2 sets of grandparents were there, too.  It can feel a bit chaotic with 16 children in the house, but I was thankful they were almost all family.  They all had a great time!

How do you handle the cake when it comes to your children’s birthdays?  Do you make it yourself