Episode 39 – Dog Agility Cake

Episode 39

Dog Agility Cake - Vanilla Chiffon Genoise cake, raspberry filling, vanilla Italian buttercream

February 27, 2011
Dog Agility Cake

So this was the first cake that I made for a paying customer.  If any of you really know me, then you know that I don’t typically take orders – especially for cakes – but when a friend of Punkin’s doggy daycare needs a really tasty cake on short notice I can’t say no.  I also can’t say no to going above and beyond what I originally plan to do – something about that shooting for the moon/landing among the stars line that they feed us in elementary school.  When the customer gave me her order she told me that she was only looking for flowers and such on her cake – pretty simple so I was glad about that but considering it was for her friend’s dog’s accomplishment I was actually expecting more customized thematic decorations.  Haha well leave it to the ladies of Waggin Tails to have read my mind before I was within a mile radius!  They presented me with a challenge to spice up the cake with some objects that they actually use in dog agility competitions.

Before I get into the decorations, let me go over the basics of the cake.  This was probably my third half-sheet cake I’ve ever made (probably 6th squarish cake I’ve iced?) and I can definitely say that I’m getting more confident with making cakes – though each time I do these cakes (unless they’re a 9″ two tier cake) I sweat bullets the entire time.  Each time I do cakes though I always learn something new that I can carry over to make my next cake even better.  I now know that the vanilla chiffon genoise cake recipe only needs a three batch to make a half sheet cake.

Normally to find out how many 9″ rounds make a large pan size I use water.  Fill the cake

Half sheet cakes are fairly large. Be sure to have the necessary cake boards and boxes and fridge space (if necessary) before taking on such a task

pan with as much water as you would batter.  This is probably the only time I would recommend volume over weight because you never know how much batter you’ll have because of the amount of air in the meringue can vary.  Now of course, if you’re doing a cake that doesn’t involve meringue then weights might be reliable.  The vanilla chiffon genoise cake though has a meringue and whipped egg yolks so there’s a lot of volume that can vary.  Anyway getting back to filling the cake pans – fill them up with water as much as you would with batter – about 2/3 or 3/4 of the way up.  Then pour them into the larger cake pan in question until you’ve filled it up 2/3 to 3/4 of the way up with water.  Then you’ll know how many 9″ rounds you’ll need to fill the larger pan which helps you know how many times you need to multiply the cake’s original batch.  When I did this with the half sheet pan I found that four 9″ cakes were needed, but when I actually made the cake batter I found that I only really needed three 9″ cakes.  I poured in all the batter anyway, because apparently I lack common sense, and it ended up over flowing.  Which is why you never see me unpan the cake – haha.  It was an easy enough fix though.  I just cut off the overhanging cake using a serrated knife.

The vanilla Italian buttercream recipe also worked very well.  I’ve learned over the past

The wood pattern I engraved on the chocolate bar using a toothpick. You can download the pattern as PDF in the downloads section

few cakes I’ve done that it really comes down to temperature.  Make your house cool – somewhere in the 60′s – if you can, or at the very least your kitchen.  Your icing will be much more cooperative and workable that way.  If you can’t do that, then keep your icing cool by using the refrigerator.  If you notice your icing is getting soupy and is falling off your spatula and cake and is swishing around your mixer it’s not ruined – it’s just too warm.  This also applies to when you add the butter to the Italian meringue and it looks like it’s separated and ruined – as long as your meringue was thick and sturdy it’s not ruined.  Just put your icing in the fridge for like 10-15 minutes and try whipping it up again.  It’ll come together and be ready to use.  I find that the batch of vanilla Italian buttercream in the recipe, just barely fits in my bowl.  The meringue nearly overflows from all the air, but when I add the butter it deflates slightly as is much more manageable.  Keep this in mind when you’re making this recipe at home.  If you have a larger mixer than I do (I think mine is a 6 qt.  I’ll measure it when I get a chance) then you might be able to do a 1.5x batch and have plenty of icing.

Another thing to keep in mind is the amount of icing.  Sure this recipe is great for a regular 9″ round cake – and it even gives you some left over.  And a quarter sheet cake?  Don’t worry you’ll have plenty of icing – even if you fill the cake.  A half sheet cake?  Er, you will just barely have enough.  And when I say that I mean you won’t have enough to fill the cake and ice the cake with the buttercream.  Or you might be able to fill the cake, but you won’t have any left for buttercream roses.  Just be aware it’ll be a thin coat all around the cake, which I think is good because I always feel like I put too much icing on my cakes anyway.

So now that we’ve got the two recipes that made the cake out of the way we can get to the decorations on top.  There were five major “obstacles” that I decided to use for the dog agility cake.  I chose them because I thought they would be easy and they would be easily identifiable to a dog owner whose dog just earned “MACH” to be added to its name.

The first decoration I thought of doing was the A frame.  Now in the video I keep saying A

The A frame obstacle I made out of a chocolate bar split in half. The piped buttercream lines are the little planks the dog would use to help climb the A frame

bars which was a mistake – the A frame is basically a plank of wood split in half and shaped like a pyramid while the A bars are like hurdle made out of pipes (for all you dog agility experts please cut me some slack : ) Everything I know about dog agility was because of this cake and I didn’t do a ton of research other than looking at pretty pictures).  For the A frame I immediately thought of chocolate bars since the are so similar in shape.  I took a toothpick to the chocolate bar and engraved a wood pattern into it in an attempt to make it look more involved and realistic.  I don’t know if I achieved all that, but I definitely like the effect.  What do you all think?

Peppermint patty? Check. Kit kats with wood engravings to look like 2x4's? Check. Piped buttercream rope? Check. Giant oversized decoration... um that's a big check. Place large bulky decorations like this towards the back of your cake to help even out the cake's appearance

The second decoration was the tire obstacle.  In dog agility this could really be anything – most of the pictures I pull up when I google dog agility equipment have a ring of some sort.  Though from what I understood from the ladies at doggy daycare that a tire was plenty acceptable.  This was a little more difficult because I needed a dark colored ring as well as something to “hang” it from.  At first I though of a doughnut – like one of those mini doughnuts from Entenmanns – but I couldn’t buy just one and I really didn’t want to have a whole box of those doughnuts sitting around my house.  (Trust me, when you make as many sweets as I do you do get tired of sweets).  Instead I had the idea of using a York peppermint patty with the center cut out – I used a serrated paring knife because a cookie cutter started to smash the patty.  To support the “tire” I decided to use kit kat bars as planks of wood (which I also used a toothpick and engraved with a wood pattern).  In theory this worked out great.  In practice it worked out even better than I thought.  But… for this cake it was a little… gigantic!  You know how your car’s side mirror says objects are bigger than they appear?  Well so is candy apparently.  The problem with decorating a cake is once you’ve touched the surface of the cake you’ve pretty much committed to that one spot – and with so little icing left to fix errors I was pretty much stuck with where it is on the cake.  I feel that it’s a little bulky where it’s located, not to mention it blocks out the writing – intrudes on it even!  If I were to do this again I would put this on the back of the cake – probably in the corner.  All in all though, I like how it came out.  It really looks like a tire hanging from planks of wood tied together with a rope.

The third decoration was the tube or chute obstacle.  These tubes are soft and collapsible

Who knew that fruit roll ups would be so useful? This chute is made out of lifesavers and a fruit roll up. Pretty cute, right?

and I wanted to convey that same look – as well as the colorful appearance.  However, I was stumped.  I had no idea what was candy-like and shaped like a cylinder.  My friend Katie and Katie Cakes Cakery said I should make it out of rice krispies treats as a log and either wrap it with something or ice it to look like a tube but I decided that I didn’t really want to deal with making something else.  Eventually it hit me – colorful candy shaped like a tube?  Lifesavers!  Of course, I couldn’t use the lifesavers roll as it was – which is where the idea of wrapping it with a fruit roll up came in to play.  I’m so glad I ate so much junk food as a kid.  This combination worked famously.  The lifesavers were a good size for the tube and the fruit roll up really mimicked the color and texture of the chute.  I used all different kinds of lifesavers but I think if I were to do it again, I would just use ones of the same color so it looks more uniform – since the dark ones show through the fruit roll up and light colored ones do not.

Weaving poles made out of Pocky with a buttercream "base." Remember when decorating your cake to keep in mind how much leftovers you going to have. This could eat into your profit margin

The fourth decoration was the weaving poles.  These poles seemed particularly popular on YouTube since every other video I found on dog agility was training your dog how to go through weaving poles.  I figured if it was that popular on YouTube it was worth having on the cake.  On top of that, it was a simple enough decoration.  At first I was going to take pretzel sticks and dip them in white chocolate and then put a red ring around top of them (kind of like a bowling pin).  I instantly decided that was too much work.  Then I thought of pocky!  Pocky is a Japanese snack which is basically a cookie or cracker shaped like a stick then dipped in chocolate.  Pocky is so popular it comes in different sizes and different coatings.  Ideally, I wanted to use a yogurt or other light colored Pocky but all I could find was the dark chocolate Pocky.  In the end, the effect is nice and it looks like weaving poles but if were to make this cake again I definitely would like to use a brightly colored Pocky.  The Pocky worked well for cake decorating too because it could just stick right inside the cake and hold its position very well.  Mayhaps this be an edible substitute for columns in tiered cakes?  They aren’t all that strong so you may have to use more but they are so thin it wouldn’t be so bad.  For my birthday I also make an “experimental” cake where I do all these things I’ve been meaning to try in cake decorating to see how they work (like one year I made my own fondant – personally not worth it since I don’t use fondant all the time, but I’m glad I did it) and this year maybe I’ll try pocky columns!

The last decoration, and my favorite, was the seesaw.  When I imagined the seesaw I had

My favorite decoration by far. A cookies and cream chocolate bar covered with a fruit roll up sitting on top of a piece of Toblerone. Very cute.

already decided that it was also going to be a chocolate bar.  But I wanted this chocolate bar to be different from the A frame so I decided to use a cookies and cream bar.  But that didn’t solve the problem of the fulcrum or apex of the seesaw (hey physics buff – what is that part called again? I’m definitely not smarter than a fifth grader).  What was candy-like and shaped like a triangle?  Duh, my all-time favorite chocolate bar!  Toblerone!  Now I do have to confess that I originally did plan on making the seesaw all milk chocolate since I couldn’t find white chocolate Toblerone but in the midst of making the cake I forgot and already cut the milk chocolate bar in half.  That being said I really do like how it came out.  I decided to wrap the cookies and cream chocolate bar with a fruit roll up to help give it a more colorful look – and a less candy bar look – and it really came out nicely.  I ended up using the top side of the chocolate bar because I thought the pieces of chocolate would look like planks of wood – what do you think?  I also cut off the ends a little to make it more shapely and to make the fruit roll up colors more even.  The whole gizmo worked out perfectly with the Toberlone and candy bar.

A fondant dog with black gel food coloring painted on. It's supposed to be a black and white cocker spaniel but it kind of looks like a dog/cow hybrid. I see sculpting classes in my near future!

To give all the equipment a finished look I piped a little grass here and there, especially around the decorations.  In addition I also took a chopstick to the cake (after it was refrigerated for an hour) and made little doggy tracks around the cake.  Most of the pictures of the cake I have don’t have the little fondant dog I made – I didn’t want to put the dog on too soon in fear that it might melt.  My friend Katie insisted that my fears were unfounded since fondant shouldn’t melt on buttercream.  She’s right of course, how else would fondant cakes stay so nice if the fondant just melted?  I ended up giving the dog to the customer after I delivered it who gave it to the girl who won to place on the cake wherever she wanted – hurray interactivity!

To make the fondant dog I just molded him out of fondant as one piece (using a thick gum paste glue, which is a mixture of gum paste gums and water, to fix any pieces that broke off) and used black gel food coloring and a paint brush to color in his markings.  The gel food coloring never really dried though so I think next time I might thin it down with either water or plain vodka so it will dry.  Oh so many things I learned making this cake.

Speaking of things I learned – there was a bit of dilemma with this cake I had.  Should I refrigerate it or not?  The cake itself did not need to be refrigerated and when the buttercream is at room temp it would taste much better.  However, since I didn’t have any icing left over if it got nicked during transporting I wouldn’t be able to fix it!  I decided to err on the side of caution and refrigerate it so the icing would be hard and wouldn’t get nicked if it was bumped slightly.  Though this worked in theory when I transported the cake it ended up putting a thin crack down the middle.  When the icing is hard and when you pick up the cake and put it down it’s like picking up and putting down a book (imagine the spine of the book slightly closing and opening).  A soft buttercream would be flexible and a crack wouldn’t appear but a hard buttercream will only crack.  Next time I’ll make sure I have plenty of icing left over for touch ups so I can avoid cracking the cake and deliver it at room temperature.

As the person who made the cake I’m sure I see a million more things wrong with the cake than you do.  Well, not necessarily wrong but things I would change in an effort to make the cake look better.  I would probably use an 822 or 823 star tip instead of an 824 – that would make the icing last longer and make the shell borders a little more proportionate.  That would also give me a little more space all around the cake.  I would probably also pipe all the words a little smaller so I would have more room for all the decorations.  Of course, nitpicking the cake is like the whole “hindsight is 20/20″ line (gee, there are a lot of cliches in this post) but I’m glad that the cake and I both came out of this alive and looking pretty good : )

All in all, I’m glad I took on this cake.   I haven’t done a cake episode in a while and doing cakes like this helps keep me on my creative toes – so to speak.  Sure I can continue to make the desserts, pies, and pastries that I’m really familiar with but do I really learn anything by doing something I’m already so familiar with?  By doing cakes and pushing myself out of my comfort zone I learn so much so quickly while running the slight risk of looking a little foolish.  But if looking silly on YouTube helps me get better at what I do, and helps show you all what to do (and what not to do) then I’m going to go for it.  Life’s too short not to take risks.  Let’s dive in feet first!  Who’s with me?

Haha well for those of you who are interested here is the Vanilla Chiffon Genoise cake recipe (also used in an earlier episode) and the Vanilla Italian Buttercream recipe (used in that same episode – if anything I’m consistent).  Here is a pattern for the wood design I engraved into the chocolate bar.  Enjoy the video and pictures below!  Let me know what you all think!  What would you have done differently?  Would you have used the same candy decorations or would you have gone the extra mile and made everything out of fondant?