We were so so so pleased to be asked to paw-ticpate in something very special last weekend…a Doggie Wedding!!!!  It was the Wedding of Boo Boo (the Groom) and Roo (the Bride) two Italian Greyhounds from Italian Greyhound Rescue Hawaii.  They were married at their home on February 23, 2013.  It was a lovely Wedding that included a ukulele player for the ceremony music, flower girl (human), Wedding Collar Bearer (dog) and lots of beautiful flowers.  We were happy to be guests at the Wedding along with our friends from Lei Woof, Island Dog Deli, K9 & Kitty Kau Kau, Healthy Doggies Hawaii, Deb McGuire Photography, Shaka Dog Hawaii and Waggin Bakery.  The Wedding was filmed by two local TV shows:  Hawaii’s Wedding Professionals and The Pet Hui.

It was also featured in the Summer 2013 issue of Island Dog Magazine!

This Doggie Wedding Cake was certainly our biggest challenge yet.  We had never made a Doggie Wedding Cake…we certainly have never made a human Wedding Cake…but we were SO excited to take it on!  In the weeks prior to the Wedding, we did a lot of research on cakes.  We knew we wanted to make it a 3 tier cake, but weren’t sure how to stack the cake.  YouTube to the rescue!  Just search “how to make a layered Wedding Cake,” and you can find tons of tutorials on Wedding Cakes.  Did you know that you have to put a piece of cardboard between each layer, and then a dowel or straw so that it won’t sink?  We sure didn’t!  Thanks YouTube!!

Layers of Doggie Wedding Cake, carefully cut cardboard and straws all ready to go!

Our next challenge with this cake was the decorating.  There are sooo many styles of Wedding Cakes out there.  We can see how Brides can get overwhelmed with choices!  Lucky for us, we were limited to simple designs that we knew we could produce.  🙂  Not going to lie, we did get tempted to make an ombre cake, since the colors of the Wedding were blue and pink.  However, we decided that since a Wedding Cake for dogs is already pretty un-traditional, we should stick with just white on white.

We looked at Pinterest a lot (we LOVE Pinterest!!) and of course…YouTube!  Thanks to YouTube, we figured out how to make these lovely flowers/roses.

Practicing Doggie Wedding Cake Designs!

Then finally the day had arrived — Wedding Day!  The night before, we baked our layers of cake:  Okinawan Sweet Potato for the bottom layer and Banana for the middle and top.  We stacked them up on each other to make sure they would look ok, then went to sleep early…3:00AM wake up call in order to frost the cake and get to the Wedding Site by 7:30am!

Bottom layer: 2 paw-ty cakes…middle layer: 1 or 2? Decisions decisions!

That morning, all the research and planning began to come together.  We set the layers of cake with cardboard in between them….we pushed in the straws to hold the cake up…each layer was carefully frosted with cream cheese and smoothed out to make a nice clean surface…

The Doggie Wedding Cake starts to come together!

Then the real fun began: icing the cake!  We knew that each design needed to have some kind of dog-related feel to it, but we didn’t want it to have TOO much dog stuff.  The goal was to make it look classy, like it could actually be a Wedding cake, but with paw prints, bones, etc to give it that dog-theme.

To be honest, we actually didn’t 100% know how each layer was going to look.  We practiced designs, but not actually where they would go on the cake.  But everything just seemed to flow that morning, and we are very happy with the designs that we chose!  Here’s the cake before we got it into the car to bring over to site:

 The cake was finished just in the nick of time (7am!), and we headed over to the Wedding Location.  The Wedding was being held about 10 minutes away from our bakery.  It wasn’t a far drive, but when you’re transporting your first EVER multi-tiered cake, lemme tell you this is the longest ride of your LIFE.  Turns out…the cake was pretty darn solid.  But that didn’t stop us from driving slowly and peeking in at it every 2 minutes!

When we got onsite, the cake was put into a cold box until the reception.  After the Ceremony, we took the cake out to finish it.  The toppers of the cake were 2 oversized Ipo’s Sweet Potato Sweethearts, on which we wrote the Bride and Groom’s names.  We finished the cake decor with 2 roses, and it was ready for noms!

Behind the scenes confession: this was actually a good 3 minutes of Niki holding the flower and moving a few centimeters back and forth while we tried to figure out exactly where to place it!

We did it! So relieved!

The humans oooed and aaahhed over the cake.  The dogs nommed it up!  All in all a great success, and we just know the cake will bring much good luck to the Bride & Groom!

Above: The Bride and Groom get the first taste!
Below: Guests are so excited to get a lick!

Serving up Doggie Wedding Cake!

This was definitely a highlight in our Hawai`i Doggie Bakery careers!  We can’t wait until it airs on OC16 and we can share the entire Wedding with all of you.  Much thanks to Krystal from Lei Woof for referring us.  Great job to Eileen from Weddings by Kalehua for coordinating EVERYTHING, she did such a great job.  We can’t wait for another doggie Wedding!  Who’s next?  🙂