A friend of mine asked me to make a dinosaur cake for her son’s third birthday. So here it is!
I didn’t take pictures along the way so I am going to try to explain the steps as well as I can!
For this cake I used a simple chocolate sponge cake that I cut in half and filled with chocolate mousse. I also baked 2 little cakes to put on top of each other and create the volcano. But you could use any kind of cake you want for this. This post is just about the decoration.
So, once you are done baking your cake, filling it up and putting the volcano on the cake, just cover it with a thin layer of whipped cream. By doing that step you won’t end up with crust in your decorating layer of whipped cream. Then put it in the fridge for 1h.
For the decoration I only used whipped cream because it was for little kids but you could use buttercream if you prefer it!
Create the template for the dinosaur cake
I used a knife to carve the template on the whipped cream. Meaning, I delimited the part that will be brown (for the volcano), beige (for the sand), green (for the grass) or blue (for the river).
Using a spatula I covered each part with the chosen colour. Then I let it cool down for 1h in the fridge.
The volcano
Once the volcano was covered in chocolate whipped cream I made a little hole in the centre. I then filled it up with orange melted white chocolate. With a little spoon, I let a little bit of orange chocolate to drip on the sides of the volcano. I then, coloured some condensed milk with red food colouring and make it drip on the sides of the volcano too.
The river
For the river I used 3 different kind of blue to give it some depth and create movement, by simply adding more blue food colouring every time. With a spatula I simply brush the blues on top of each other. Then I put a little plain white whipped cream to create foam on the side of the river.
The sand and the rocks
The rocks were really simple! I just piped a little of left over whipped cream, grey and beige, here and there. And voila!
The sand is actually made of crushed shortbread cookies! It looks pretty real and it tastes delicious!
The dinosaurs on your dinosaur cake
I’m nit big with fondant but if you are go for it and make little fondant dinos! I simply used plastic dinosaurs which gave the dinosaur cake a really good look and made a nice little gift for the birthday boy!