The Dinosaur Cake!

T-Rex Cake

If you follow the blog regularly you will know that I usually set myself the task of making something special for Lauren's birthday cake - we have so far had the a  Number 1 cake big enough to feed the whole street, one emergency shop bought Fifi cake, Lightening McQueen, an M&S caterpillar cake, a scene from her favourite Mr Man story, the Avro VulcanXH558 and a dragon.

This year the request was for a dinosaur cake. I needed to make sure that it wasn't just another version of last years dragon - it needed to be something different altogether. So I set about a bit of Internet research and came across the blog "So you think you're crafty" which I found so helpful. There was a tutorial for a T-Rex cake. The lady who writes the site has a mum who sounds like she is an experiences cake baker and had guided her daughter on how to make the cake, I didn't have a lot of the equipment that they used at my disposal and they also made a lot of their "cake" out of a moulded puffed rice mixture, no criticism from me that's probably very sensible, but I wanted all of my cake to be edible.

Now usually I am very prepared and have up to a week to design, prepare, construct and decorate the cake, this year I found myself having just 2 evenings - a week apart.

On the first evening I got myself a 10" square tine, an 8" round tin and a pudding bowl, greased and lined them all and proceeded to make a lot of chocolate cake mixture. I'd recently been experimenting with a moist chocolate cake mix (I will blog about the Charlie & the Chocolate Factory cake and the Bonfire Cake soon) but I personally didn't enjoy the taste or texture, although everyone else did and in this instance I didn't believe the sponge would have the body needed to shape the dinosaur or support the heavy icing so I resorted back to may trusty Victoria sandwich recipe - weigh the eggs and use equal amounts of sugar, butter, flour (I substituted some of the flour for cocoa powder and also added a load of chocolate chips) and bake for about 30 minutes at GM4/180C (until it's firm  to touch and if you poke a skewer in it will come out clean).

Ready for the icing

That gave me 3 enormous chunks of cake, which I allowed to cool and then started to work with. First, I halved the sponges vertically and sandwiched them back together with chocolate butter cream. I prepared the bottom of my cake box by covering it in foil and dobbing on some butter cream to stick the sponge down and then placed the round cake next to the square cake, with the intention of the dinosaurs head sitting diagonally on the board, I then stuck the pudding shaped sponge on top of the round sponge and with my bread knife started to carve out the shape, rounding off the head, shaping the nose, cutting out eye holes and nostrils and a mouth. Once I was happy that it looked like a very basic dino head I out the base back in the cake box wrapped it all carefully in greaseproof paper, cling film and foil, the sealed it inside several carrier bags and put it in the freezer ready for the following week.

On the second night a week later I removed the cake from the freezer and removed all the wrapping. I started to work on it straight away. I covered the whole form with chocolate butter cream. Then I used coloured fondant icing, rolling into sausage shapes to form the nostrils and eye sockets.

The next stage was to roll out 2 kgs of white fondant icing (I probably could have got away with 1.5kg). I tried to roll it as thin as I could, but you can't go too thin due to the weight and surface area you are covering, if it was too thin when you picked it up it would tear due to the weight. Once rolled, I carried it carefully using the rolling pin and my arm over the cake and draped it over, using the flat of my hands to mould it over the dinosaur shape, making sure to press it into the eye holes, nostrils and mouth.

Adding the texture

The next job was to get the texture on the skin, I used the metal nozzle from a piping bag - the round end and pressed it lightly into the icing to make a scaly pattern. Once I had the effect over the whole of the icing it was time to colour it. I used green gel colouring, powdered green colouring and red yellow and blue cake colouring. I put circles of each on a plate and then used a fresh, straight out of the packet dishcloth with a textured weave to mix the colours and dab them onto the icing to give a mottled green and brown colour. I used a paint brush (one I have especially for cake making) to add some detail and a red mouth. The final steps were to make the eyes and the teeth which I did using fondant icing and stuck them on by making a glue from icing sugar and water.

 

The finished cake