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!

Halloween Decorated Cupcakes!

Yesterday I went to a "Craft 'til you Crash" night at church, and I signed up for the cupcake decorating class.  It was totally fun!  So, this isn't really a recipe, but I am going to talk about how to decorate like this.  I thought the chocolate work would be difficult, but it was really easy.  Both the cat and the tree are made out of chocolate. 

1. First, decide what you want to make and draw a picture of it - a simple outline is all you need.
2. Put your chocolate in a ziploc sandwich bag and microwave it in short bursts until it is all melted.  If you heat it too much, your bag will melt, so keep an eye on it!
3. Place your picture under a piece of wax paper.  Snip the corner of your plastic bag (make sure it is a small hole) and "draw" your picture on the wax paper using the chocolate.
4. If you want to put dusting sugar on it (like the cat above) make sure to put it on before the chocolate hardens.  Place your chocolate in the freezer to get them extra hard before putting on the cupcakes!

The rest of this decorating is just frosting, bone shaped candies and dusting sugar.  It was so fun!  I'm going to be trying more fun decorating soon.