SilhouPETte Birthday Cake

My friend, Christine, contacted me to make a birthday cake for her best friend, Jessica, who is the founder and owner of SilhouPETte.  Jessica makes really great custom silhouettes of your pet to have as keepsakes or gifts.  Christine asked me to make a cake mimicking one of Jessica's pieces using Jessica's own dog, Dixon, as the silhouette.

Can you guys tell the boo-boo I made?  The damask print on the cake board is upside down!  I'm so bummed about this too because I spent quite a bit of time thinking of how I could closely imitate Jessica's art.  I'm used to making round cakes so this is actually the first time I've ever even used a rectangular cake board.  I didn't pay attention to the orientation of the silhouette when I set it in place so I didn't notice that it was upside down until it was too late.  Blah!  So irritated that I made such a silly mistake. 

I have been customizing my own cake boards lately by covering them with wrapping paper.  I think that it gives the cake a little more of a dramatic effect.  When I let Christine know that I would be doing an oval cake on a rectangular cake board, to give the cake the feel of a SilhouPETte, she requested that the pattern on the cake board be damask and sent me a picture of one of Jessica's pieces as an example.  I looked in several different stores to try and find a wrapping paper with a similar damask print as what Christine showed me but I wasn't satisfied with what I saw.  So, after endless searching on the internet for different damask patterns, one image lead me to Etsy.  I didn't know this but there are a few graphic artists who sell packages of digital prints through there.  I used VNdigitalart.  I paid a whopping 3 dollars and they sent me a link to download about a dozen images.  Pretty neat, I think.  So, I printed out a few sheets of the image I wanted and pasted them onto the board.

To get Dixon's silhouette onto the cake, I printed his image in the size that I wanted, cut it out and glued it onto a manila file folder.  Then I took an X-acto knife and cut out a stencil along the edge of the image.

Sorry for the funky lighting!

I had made the template intending to use the cut out and not the stencil, but really either would work. 

One more for Dixon's ear so that it would pop out on the cake.

The cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting filling. 

Please check out Jessica's stuff at SilhouPETte!  Christine is also an AMAZING event and wedding photographer.  Check out her blog at christinechangphotoblog.com.  I am moved by her photos every time.