My dog ate the cake... seriously!

Here's a little tale about how this...

became this in a matter of 20 minutes...

Let me back up and explain what happened...

A friend of mine was having a bridal shower and I offered to make the cake.  I was all excited because I had a couple designs in mind and I couldn't wait to try one of them.  I'm new to using fondant so I did a trial version the week before.  It was a funky one-tier square cake with zebra stripes.  If I ever dig up those photos, I may post that eventually.  But since the shower's theme was a tea party, I thought a zebra striped cake might be a bit much.  So I settled on a classic two-tier cake with pink and yellow flowers.  Starting the night before I made 4 square cakes - two 8" and two 6" - using the most fabulous recipe I got from Bakerella that you can find here.  It's honestly the best yellow cake ever!  Very moist...

That's the cake with the sides cut off to make it as square as possible.  Then off comes the top...

Then use Martha's buttercream recipe to stack the two 8" squares and two 6" squares.  Here's the 8" all frosted and ready for the top tier.

I love that buttercream recipe and use it for most cupcakes and cakes I make.  Mmmmm.... buttercreammmmmmm....

Anyway... while the frost-covered cake set for a bit in the fridge I tinted and rolled out fondant to make some flowers.  Here's a close up of a couple of them drying on parchment paper.

The next morning when they were dry I rolled out the fondant and covered the cake, added the flowers and had a bit of fun with some left over icing which I used to make little vines.

All finished just in time for me to take a quick shower and then make it to the bridal shower right on time... or so I thought...
Upon coming out of the shower I discovered that the dog had gotten up on the counter, pulled the cake off and proceed to lick and pretty much destroy the entire top tier and most of the bottom.  I found him innocently lying on the kitchen floor next to the remnants of the cake.  Desperately hoping to salvage some part of the cake, I turned the top tier over on the pan it had baked on... maybe if I cut off the portion he licked....

Nope, not gonna happen.  The fondant was in a pile on its own (apparently the dog was more interested in the buttercream than the fondant) and no matter how I cut the cake it had no chance of survival.  I'm sure everyone at the party will thank me for giving up on the idea of saving some portion of the cake.  Sorry, Melissa... these pictures will have to suffice.

For the animal lovers in the group, the dog is fine (he's lucky it wasn't chocolate cake)... although if he ever does this again, he's not going to be with us for much longer...

And for the bridal shower lovers in the group, Cake Love came to the rescue with a last minute layered chocolate cake.