Inside a world of upscale pet bakeries that specialize in birthday cakes for dogs

PHILADELPHIA -- Every evening after Steph Johnson drives home from work, she spends roughly five hours baking in her kitchen. As Taylor Swift plays on loop, Johnson pipes ruffles onto tiers of "Bluey" and Batman-inspired birthday cakes and frosts sheets of shortbread cookies molded into tiaras, ice cream cones, and Swoop, the Eagles mascot.

But Johnson’s clients aren’t elementary schoolers. They’re dogs.

Johnson owns Manayunk’s Pet Friendly Dog Bakery, a confectionary at 4324 Main Street in Philadelphia that sells dog-safe pastries from Johnson’s kitchen. Her work ranges from pop tarts to custom heart-shaped Lambeth cakes.

Johnson purchased the bakery from its former owners in 2022, but said business took off the following year when an influx of pet parents started asking the same question: How can you make my pup’s birthday or adoption anniversary special?

Now, Johnson is closing Pet Friendly Dog Bakery’s brick-and-mortar on Oct. 19 to focus on baking custom orders for celebrations, which make up around 20% of Johnson’s overall business. Prices start at $29.99 for a 4-inch cake and go up as you add tiers, flavors, and toppers.

“It’s my favorite part of my job to the point where I actually looked into being a cake decorator for, like, a human bakery,” Johnson said. “The cakes are getting better and better, but I just can’t do the day-in, day-out parts of the business.”

Johnson’s success stems from a change in pet parent behavior, where the line between how we treat dogs and children has thinned. Dog ownership in the United States surged after the pandemic along with pet spending, which is expected to balloon into a $260 billion industry by 2030, according to Morgan Stanley. And for dog owners that are empty-nesters, the extra spending and attention is worth it. Fur babies are family, they say, and they deserve the best — including birthday cakes that look good enough for a human to eat.

Dog mom Linda Ziccardi told The Inquirer that her 3-year-old Emmy (a Staffordshire terrier) and her 13-year-old Blue (an Australian Blue Heeler and Beagle mix) have come to expect bone-shaped birthday cakes from Pete’s K9 Treats in Glendora. The cakes, she believes, matter most to Blue, who she rescued after he lost a leg.

“I have a 30-year-old son and am going to be a grandmother … but my pets are just as much as part of the family,” said Ziccardi, 57, of Runnemede. “We celebrate our birthdays and anniversaries and big days. [Dogs] deserve the same. Their lives are just as special.”

From ‘bark’-mitzvahs and gender reveals to three-tiered birthdays

While there are limits to what ingredients you can use in a dog-safe cake, there are few when it comes to decorating. Most pet-safe pastries lack refined sugar, which is difficult for canines to digest in large quantities. Johnson works with yogurt icing and other ingredients dogs can process, like blueberries or pumpkin.

Pete’s K9 Treats owner Nicole Morelli-Sutter fell into the dog pastry business thanks to her pit bull Pete — the bakery’s namesake — whose severe allergies required homemade treats. Most of her cakes are made with ingredients Pete can enjoy: wheat and coconut flour, coconut oil, and peanut butter or pumpkin.

After they bake, Morelli-Sutter uses standard cake piping tips and hard yogurt icing to outline the cakes in uniform swirls or flowers, often in vibrant blue, pink, or green hues. For a finishing touch, she adds pawprint stamps.

No order, Morelli-Sutter said, is too outlandish. At the end of September, she drew bite-sized Stars of David onto a bone-shaped cake for a “bark” mitzvah for Zeus, a doodle from Cherry Hill who turned 12. She handles gender reveals, too, slathering a thick layer of pink or blue frosting in between cake tiers.

“I make about eight [custom] cakes a week and, without fail, at least one person says, ‘This cake is pretty big. Can we eat this too?’” said Morelli-Sutter.

Can they?

Sure, but it‘ll taste like half-sweet peanut butter gruel.

Johnson has tasted everything she makes for Pet Friendly Dog Bakery at least once. Her dog clients prefer a soft and crumbly cake similar in texture to ones for human consumption.

“Would I eat this normally? Probably not. But if I got stuck in the store and had to live off dog treats, I could survive,” Johnson said. She makes an exception for her bacon-cheddar pupcakes. Those taste “exactly like Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits.”

Johnson’s repertoire spans panda cakes topped with frosted bones to, most recently, a three-tiered cake for an 11-year-old pup whose owners requested a pale blue and green color scheme with a different flavor for each layer.

“It weighed 15 pounds,” Johnson said. “If they add a fourth layer next year, I’m telling them no.”

Meeting the demands of pet parenthood

Pet birthday cakes were never the norm according to Melissa Morales, who started her organic dog biscuit Melmos Treats in 2019. Morales’ no-frills treats comes in flavors like Beef Stew and Mint Berry and are sold in 75 stores across 15 states.

That felt like enough until she attended a pet expo in January, Morales said, where she was repeatedly asked about getting into the pet pastry game. In May, Morales opened a store at 905 S. 9th Street in the Italian Market, where she has two fridges filled with cakes, teddy bear cookies, and biscuits shaped like Swoop.

“This was something I said I’d never do,” Morales said. “I just wanted to make dog biscuits.”

Morales’ $30 cakes are adapted from biscuit recipes and frosted with mashed potatoes that are naturally dyed with spirulina and beets or pumpkin. To decorate, Morales prefers to press edible flowers or fruit chips on the sides. Her homemade aesthetic is deliberate.

“It’s not going to look like a [human’s] birthday cake, it’s going to look like a cake for a dog because the dog should come first,” she said. “People want something that looks like it’s for a human birthday and I have to explain that’s not what I do.”

Sometimes, though, the cake is for the human — at least in part.

Stephanie McNeilly, of Magnolia, purchased her first birthday cake from Pete’s K9 Treats for Hunter — her 7-year-old English Pointer Lab mix — last July. The festivities included a steak off the grill and a trip to his treat closet, plus a regular birthday cake for McNeilly.

The cake “was probably more for me since I wonder if he knows why we’re celebrating,” McNeilly said. “Anything I can do to make him happy makes me happy … He always comes first.”