Dinosaur Birthday Cake

For his birthday, my son wanted a cake that was a dinosaur.  I had seen cakes that were dino themed, but I wasn't sure if I would be able to recreate it.  It was much easier than I expected!  Here's how I did it.

Bake your cake in a bowl.  I used a Pyrex bowl because it is oven safe.  The cake recipe I used made more cake than I wanted in the bowl, so I cooked the extra in a bread pan.

Put a little blob of frosting on your plate where you want the cake to go.  This will act as a glue to help keep your cake in place.  Then do a thin coat of frosting to keep the crumbs from spreading.  After doing this, put the cake in the fridge for an hour.  You want the frosting to NOT come off on your finger when you touch it.

While the cake was hardening up in the fridge, I took some of the extra cake and crumbled it up, mixed it with some frosting (this is how you make cake balls, by the way), and shaped it to be my head, feet and tail, and then frosted them with a crumb coat as well.

Although I used butter-cream frosting for the majority of the cake, I did do the accents with fondant.  I cut out circles for the spots, squares for the plates along his back (we were making a stegosaurus), and I rolled little snakes and cut off the ends for the claws and spikes.

After everything was hardened enough, I pulled out all the pieces and put them together with pieces of popsicle sticks.  Then I did a thick coat of frosting over everything to make it look like one solid piece.

Add the decorations, and voila!  you have a dinosaur cake!