I’m a simple woman: the highlights of my day every single day are eating delicious foods and hanging out with my adorable cat. I love cooking and baking, and I spend more time than I’d like to admit watching cooking videos and scrolling through recipes online. There’s always something new I’d like to try! And I’m obsessed with my cat. He’s the cutest little creature I’ve ever seen, and we’re definitely best friends.
So this list combines two of my favorite things, while somehow making these animals appear even more adorable than they were before. The internet loves sharing photos of unappetizing foods or things that look like they could be edible but actually aren’t. But in this case, I’m not even disappointed that I can’t chomp down on these items that appear to be edible, because they’re still precious! At least I can feast upon these cuties with my eyes.
While most of us can agree that it doesn’t sound great to eat a dog, cat, parakeet, turtle, snake or hedgehog, many of us are interested in the opportunity to chomp down on a hyper realistic cake. And some of them happen to look a lot like our beloved pets! The trend of creating cakes that look eerily like anything from hamburgers to humans has been huge online over the past few years, and some bakers specialize in making animal-inspired cakes.
Texas-based baker Dusty Sinclair wrote a piece for Newsweek breaking down how she became an expert on these animalistic cakes, noting that it all began in 2017 when she made a massive Mahi-Mahi cake for a friend’s wedding. “Once I had made that one cake, I was hooked! Pictures of it were published in the local papers here in Texas but, looking back, I don't think it was that good!” Dusty shared. “There are things you wish you could go back in time and fix. But once people saw the Mahi-Mahi cake, it began to grow. Now, I have two or three orders every weekend for these realistic fish or animal cakes.”
While it’s adorable to see animals that resemble foods, it can be adorable and delicious to see cakes that have an uncanny resemblance to animals. “I've made realistic cake versions of Blue Marlin, Saltfish, Snapper, Redfish, Trout, Flounder and I have an upcoming Roosterfish. I've also made a lot of deer cakes—everyone loves the White-tailed deer—and I've made rattlesnakes and different ducks,” Dusty told Newsweek.
The baker also noted that she strays away from using fondant on her creations and instead using buttercream and modeling chocolate. “I don't like the way fondant tastes and I don't want my cakes to be known for looking pretty but tasting like Play-Doh,” Dusty says.
As far as the process for creating cakes that look like animals, Dusty says she starts with drawing it out life-size and then sketching the internal structure to get an idea for how the cake will be supported. “If the structure requires support, say the antlers of a deer, I weld out the metal frame and then cover it in aluminum foil and cake safe covering before adding the modeling chocolate on top,” she explained.
“With a deer cake, for example, everything is completely made of cake, up to the top of its head, then I have the metal frame structure for its antlers that is then covered with modeling chocolate. Everything is edible, it's just the internal structure is a metal frame,” Dusty added.
Nowadays, there are plenty of bakers around the world making hyper realistic cake creations of beloved animals. London’s The Cake Illusionist is another, who was featured on Business Insider for making incredible dog cakes, elephant cakes, horse cakes and more. Her custom creations start at £250, but if you’re looking for a truly unique and eye-catching cake, you won’t be disappointed. Perhaps, you can even get a cake made of your kitten that already resembles a cake!
Another accomplished hyper realistic cake maker that could definitely turn your beloved pets into an adorable cake is Natalie Sideserf from Austin, Texas. She’s made turtles, frogs, snakes, beetles, crabs, and of course, countless items that aren’t animals too. She might be the perfect person to contact if you want to turn your little corgi that looks like a loaf of bread into a cake that looks like a corgi!
