Stumpy dog cake and adventures in caramel icing

It was Lidia's potluck birthday party today so Mr T and I decided to bake her a cake that looked like her dog stumpy. I got a pic of Stumpy from one of Lidia's old blog posts:
I then cropped the pic just around his head and enlarged it so that it fit on A4 paper. Mr T then traced the outline onto baking paper and I then placed the baking paper over the top layer of the cake and used a toothpick to make lots of holes around the outline.

We made kittee's chocolate cake but figured that Stumpy's colouring is properly closer to the colour of caramel than it is to chocolate, and I remembered that Lidia loves caramel. So last night we make caramel icing based on this recipe on recipezaar, it was perfect and soft but then once we put in the fridge overnight and it hardened up so much that I couldn't use it. We did still use it in between the two layers of cake which was probably a mistake but it just seemed so wasteful to throw it all away.

Then this morning we decided to have another go and I learnt that caramel goes very quickly from nice caramel to burnt caramel. So we decided to go on the side of caution and made caramel where you could still actually feel some of the sugar. It was way too gooey though and I couldn't put it in my icing gun and it was the biggest pain to do a picture with. Luckily I had Mr T to help me.

I used vanilla frosting from vctotw for the white parts though and that worked well, I then also made a blue outline using the vanilla frosting and blue food dye. And I used black writing icing for the nose and inside of the ears.

Probably the biggest problem apart from the caramel was the eyes, when I put the second layer of cake on top of the first layer cracked right down the middle where the eyes needed to go. So I piped some vanilla icing into the hap and then put the black eyes on but it just looked creepy so we played around with them so much that they still look kind of weird.

Still I'm kind of proud since it is my first decorated cake that I made with regular soft icing as opposed to marzipan even if it does look a little like a horse or some sort of other animal instead of a dog.

I really think I need to get some sort of cake decorating book or the women's day cookbook though to help out with the next one.

Taste wise, the chocolate cake was ok but I think I prefer her vanilla cake (without vinegar) and the caramel icing was kind of sickly sweet but that's just caramel, right?