The Sausage Dog

It was Lola’s first birthday on the 12th of Feb 2018. So naturally, I made her the most amazing Dog Meat Birthday Cake.

Lola had 9 doggy friends and about 18 humans to help her celebrate her first birthday party. As usual, I made way too much food, and completely spoiled Lola. All of Lola’s friends brought presents for her, which was really so nice 🙂 Thank you to each of you.

The cake ended up fairly epic, and the dogs went mental over it. There was a bit of growling and snapping over it, which means it must have been awesome. It was quite an engineering feat to make this cake, you need a lot of potato to hold it all together. I only had two potatoes. Once I realised it was clearly not enough, I dug out some frozen sweet potato mash that I had lying around, so that saved the day, and gave Lola’s cake it’s lovely orange colour. I debated the merits of the traditional candle and the fact that Lola is a dog that is liable to jump into the cake while she tries to devour it. In the end, I whittled a carrot down to look like a candle, and that worked pretty well.

I’ll be honest with you, the mixture and the actual meat cake is pretty gross. It smells weird, the texture is weird, and no human in their right mind would eat it. But clearly dogs love it, so oh well.

In addition to the Dog Meat Birthday Cake, I also made my puppycakes for the puppies to take home.

Thank you to all who came and made Lola’s 1st birthday party so special, she had such a blast 🙂

Serves: 20 dogs

Prep-time: 45 minutes

Cooking time: 45 minutes – 1 hour

Cooling time: 30 minutes

Assembly time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

1 cup diced carrot

500g lamb liver

500g lean ground beef

1 cup cooked white rice

1 cup quick-cooking oats

2 large eggs

2 tbsp vegetable oil

Instructions:

1. TO MAKE THE MEATLOAF CAKE: Preheat the oven on 180°C. In a food-processor, pulse and run carrot and lamb liver until finely minced (you may have to scrape the sides and bottom a couple times). Now add the ground beef and cooked white rice, then run the processor again for about 1 min until the mixture is paste-like and sticky again. This step strengthens the bondage between protein and water, reducing the amount of moisture the “cake” will lose during baking. Now add the quick-cooking oat and the eggs, and run for another min for the same effect. Then   oil, and run for another min.
2. Line an 18 cm round cake-pan with parchment, then transfer the mixture inside, pressing it down gently and smooth the top. Bake in the oven for 45 – 50 min an inserted wooden skewer comes out clean. Remove from the pan and set aside on a cooling rack for 30 min, or until cool enough to handle.
3. TO MAKE THE POTATO “FROSTING”: While the cake is baking, make the “frosting”. In a large pot, add enough cold water until it covers the diced potatoes/sweet potato, then bring to a gentle boil, and cook until a pairing knife can be easily inserted into the potatoes, approx 10 – 15 min. Drain the potatoes and return to the hot pot for 10 min so excess moisture can evaporate. Mash it with unsalted butter.
4. TO ASSEMBLE THE CAKE: With a long serrated knife, cut the meatloaf-cake horizontally into 2/3 layers. Smear a thin layer of potato-frosting in between each meatloaf-layers, then stack them up. Then cover the exterior surface evenly with the rest of the potato-frosting. It can be as rustic or as refined as you like. If you want a smooth surface like this one, you can lightly oil the surface of a butter knife, then gently drag it across the surface to smooth it (apply more oil to the knife as needed). Decorate the cake with with doggy biscuits and whatever your dog loves. Then don’t torture your dogs any further. Let them have at it immediately.