About a month ago, my wonderful sister in law gave me the opportunity to design and create a cake to celebrate her daughter’s 2nd birthday. I always appreciate the freedom of her cake requests. She provides a main theme and several sources of inspiration, but she lets me play with the final cake design.

For Layla’s birthday she asked for a Puppy, multilevel cake. I later received a picture of the beautiful dress Layla would be wearing at the party. Amy also added a few cake ideas on her Pinterest board and the rest was up to me. Love it!!

Here is a collage that features most of the details of the cake.

A red doggy collar with a shimmering silver buckle is the detail that separates the tiers. Now I wish I would have made a dog leash… maybe next time.

A set of cute and playful puppies are the main details of this birthday cake. Since the puppies are all females, I folded stripes of fondant and used them to create the little flowers that you see by their ears. The pink one has a couple of bows though…. with lots of shimmering dust.

Black set of puppy paws are placed on the front of the top tier. I also made smaller gray and brown paws, but they are on the sides and back (and I didn’t take a picture). The doggy bone accents the bottom tier and emphasizes the 2nd birthday.

And here’s a final look of the cake before getting into the cookie part. Oh, cake flavors include Almond cake and Strawberry cake.

Here are the sugar decorated cookies. I absolutely love the many possibilities to decorate Scotty cookies. Their little vest are very versatile and could be well adopted to any color scheme.

A few more doggy cookies. Since I don’t know the specific breed of this cookie cutter, we can assume is a lovely and faithful mutt.

There you go. A wonderful set of treats for a puppy/dog lover of any age. In this case, my now 2 year old niece Layla.

I hope you had a fun and beautiful birthday.

I have mixed feeling about the following post.

I absolutely love making sugar cookies, but this time I was a little bit sad during the process of baking and decorating these set of cookies.

They were designed to ‘celebrate’ the good life of a gorgeous dog who unfortunately passed away, Banks, a Bernese Mountain Dog.

Usually this tricolor  Swiss breed  has a patch of widely spread white hair on top of the head.

Banks had a distinctive line of white hair, more like a triangle. So I focused on that particular feature when creating all of his cookies.

This is my third set of BMD cookies.  You can see previous posts here and here. In this particular set I included four different designs.

I think this is by far my favorite design. The green leaves make the dog image pop up a little bit more, I think.

The cookies were  meant to be shared with family and friends of this wonderful dog.  Here one more time is Banks, the beautiful Bernese Mountain Dog.

I tried to capture his image the best I could. His owner was very happy to receive the cookies and like I told him, the cookies were made with love and always thinking of his beloved Banks.

Calling ALL dog lovers out there…

A few years back, 2009 to be exact, I worked on some dog cookies. Bernese Mountain Dog cookies to be specific.

I am by no means an expert, but before having  my children (you know, back when I actually had time to watch tv) I watched so many Best in Show and AKC episodes that I learnt a thing or two about certain breeds. If you are not familiar with this breed, let me share with you a what I know about the Bernese Mountain Dog.

The Bernese Mountain Dog (BMD) is absolutely beautiful and large in size. They are recognizable by their striking tri-color coats (brown, black and white) and they belong to the  working group. They are very strong dogs yet very gentle. They are the perfect family breed, very suitable for children. And those eyes… those beautiful eyes… the look they give you can melt anyone’s heart. This Swiss breed  loves the cold weather and snow (brrrrr).

Oh yeah, back to the cookies.

I received a request to make some BMD cookies. Molly had seen my cookies from 2009 and asked me to design some cookies to celebrate her dear Beau’s birthday.

So in honor of Beau’s birthday, we have some Bernese Mountain Dog cookies.

The sugar cookies are covered in sweet royal icing and the dog design is made out of chocolate, therefore not suitable for dogs. This particular design I used on the cookies I made a few years ago. The only difference is that the design on the BMD cookies from 2009 were made out of royal icing. I think I like this new version better.

I decided to make a different design and focus on the face, but I waited to see a picture of the real Beau to make sure that I added his features. Do you see the little tongue coming out of his mouth?

If you see closely to the cookie in the middle, I added a birthday hat. The name was simply added with an edible marker. See at the end of the post for Decorating Tips.

Beau goes to a doggy daycare so the cookies were meant to be shared with the caretakers. They were actually going to be having a birthday party for Beau! How exciting! Beau was also going to be celebrated at home with family members so the cookies were special favor gifts.

So what do you think? I absolutely loved them!!!

Here’s the gorgeous Beau!

Happy Birthday Beau!!! I hope you had a wonderful birthday.

Thank You Molly for giving me the opportunity to work again on these cookies.

***

Decorator’s Tip – Working with edible markers.

If you are planning on doing any type of writing or scribbling on a cookie, make sure that the cookies is completely dry before touching it with your edible marker. I love using Americolor edible markers, but Wilton markers work well also and they are more easily accessible. Americolor markers can be found online while Wilton markers can be purchased at local craft stores or even Wal-Mart.