Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Dino Birthday Cake!

Everything just looks more perky and exciting with an exclamation point after it!  Don't you agree?!  Anyway, for my son's birthday party, he wanted a "dinosaur cake".  I took this idea from the Family Fun website, for a "Bug Mountain" cake, and made it a "Dinosaur Mountain" cake instead.  You take a 9x13 cake, and a cake baked in a Pyrex glass bowl (mine had about a 1 liter capacity, I think) and "glue" them together with frosting.  Then you frost the whole thing with a chocolate frosting.  You cover that with "dirt", which is just store-bought chocolate cookies, crushed in your food processor. 

My husband helped with the decorating part of this cake- he carefully smooshed the "dirt" into the frosting, and then he added a lake and river with that store-bought blue gel icing stuff.  (The first time I've used that- I usually don't use stuff like that, but it did make a nice, shiny-looking lake).  Then he made "grass" by piping homemade green frosting through a grass tip- Wilton 233.  Finally, he added the (clean) plastic dinosaurs with the help of our son. 

For the cake part, I used my fave chocolate pound cake.  Then I made a chocolate butter frosting.  For the cookie dirt, I used Keebler Fudge Shoppe Fudge Sticks, Oreos, and two varieties of these seemingly controversal (and kinda non-PC) cookies, sold locally (but made in Spain), called "Filipinos".  (Those Filipinos are darn good, too- I'm addicted to the white chocolate ones.  Ahem.)
Chocolate Butter Frosting
by What a Dish!

1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup cocoa powder
4-5 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3-5 tablespoons milk

Cream together butter, cocoa powder, powdered sugar, and vanilla.  Add milk slowly, until desired consistency is achieved. 
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2 comments:

LadyJayPee said...

That is so clever. I wouldn't have known where to start. Amazing how much it looks like dirt. And that's a compliment! LOL!

Sugar said...

Oh my goodness! That is such a great cake! How creative!!