12th April 2011 – Dinosaur cake

So iv been busy recently, namely assignments, exams and moving house and so I havent had much chance to update this, but impressed myself with this cake so thought that even though it was a while ago i would still share it. It was my sister’s 24th birthday on the 9th of May, so I thought about making her a cake again. I've made 1 for my mum and my sister for the last couple of years and usually I make just a round chocolate cake, put cream in the middle, cover the top in melted chocolate and decorate it with smarties, flakes, etc, but this year I wanted to try something a bit different, but was unsure what to do. My sister loves dinosaurs, stegosaurus’s being her favourite, and I saw on another blog I follow (called “cakecuccino”) that she had made a 3d dinosaur cake, which looked amazing, but I felt it was a little bit ambitious for my first attempt at a shaped cake, so I searched for a simpler dinosaur design. I decided that I ought to practice it first to see how big it would be, how easy it was, if I was happy with how it will look and just to have an experiment basically. So after a trip to town to get some sweets and other bits I had a go that afternoon.

Usually I would make my own cake, chocolate of course, but as it was just a test run and it was the shape of the dinosaur and the decorating part I really wanted to have a play with I decided to save some time and effort by buying a couple of cake mixes from Asda. I’m also not very good at icing, I’ve tried a couple of times and it’s never quite right, it usually ends up being too runny so it goes everywhere and takes hours to dry or its not very spreadable, so I decided to try some Betty Crocker vanilla butter cream icing instead. I have to say it was a good idea as it tastes lovely, is easy to work with and guarantees perfect icing, which, at £1.70, is a small price to pay to make things a little bit easier for myself.

           

Cake Ingredients

♥       Water

♥       Butter

♥       2 Eggs

♥       2 Asda chosen by you chocolate cake mix

 

Method

1. Make the cake mixes according to the packet instructions (did it a while ago so can’t remember this particular packet mix instructions but each packet mix will be different anyway).  
2.  Put cakes in oven for the specified time, then remove from oven and test with a knife inserted in the middle, which should come out clean, then place on a wire rack to cool.  

 To decorate

♥       Betty Crocker vanilla buttercream

♥       Orange food colouring

♥       2 Toblerones

♥       Chocolate chips

♥       Cadburys buttons

♥       Silver balls

♥       Tubes of icing

1. Cut straight across the bottom of 1 cake and then cut out a U at the bottom as well and that will give you the main body and legs of the dinosaur. Put some icing on the underneath of the cake then place in the centre of the cake board, nearer the bottom than the middle. I couldn’t find a proper cake board that I thought would be big enough and couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money to get one online, so I bought a large white chopping board from wilko’s instead, it does the job fine though and could even be covered if preferred.
2. Use the other cake for the tail and the neck & head. You can use a stencil but I didn’t find it too difficult to cut them out without one. I cut the bottom of the neck a bit narrow so it looked a little odd at first, so just used some of the leftover cake to put a triangle of cake at the neck/body join to make it look right.
3. You can eat the rest of the leftover cake, either on its own or with a little bit of the icing (well you have to test the cake before you can give it away as you don’t want to give them bad cake).
4. Once you have placed the head and tail where you want it to be then put a bit of the buttercream on the underneath to attach it to the board and then you can do the crumb coating. A crumb coating is a layer of icing/buttercream over the cake to make sure all the crumbs are covered and won’t be getting into the proper icing layer. Once you have spread the icing over it all then place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes to let the buttercream set.
5. I coloured the buttercream with orange food colouring, applied the crumb coating and left it for 30 minutes in my fridge. The crumb coating was a bit tricky, especially the parts where I had cut it as that was very crumby but for a first attempt it went ok.
6. After it was set I applied another coat, thicker this time of the buttercream, which was tricky trying to get it smooth and it still had a few crumbs, but I quite liked the look it gave.
7. I then got onto the fun job of decorating it. As my sister loves the stegosaurus more than the other dinosaurs I decided that was the direction I should go in so I used Toblerone pieces to make the spikes along its back and tail, and chocolate chips over its head and neck as little spikes.
8. I placed chocolate buttons on the body to make it a spotty dinosaur and used little silver balls for the legs to indicate the toes. I finished it off with a little red icing for the mouth and eyes.
9. While it was quite a tricky cake to decorate at some points I did feel that for a first attempt at a “character” cake it turned out pretty good and looked quite cute actually. Tasted really nice too.
10. The people who have seen pictures of it have been pretty impressed with it, but unfortunately I wont be able to transport it very well if I was to make another one, as getting it to my sister requires about 2 buses and 2 trains and as I don’t have a box big enough to transport it safely I am unfortunately unable to make her one for her birthday next week, so I settled on making her and our friends some cupcakes instead.