Dinosaur Cake!

Around about a year ago, my friends and I gathered at our flat to watch Dinosaur movies on a Monday, hence the name 'Dinosaur Monday!' This Monday movie night turned into a tradition and now every Monday we gather at someone's flat and watch movies along with some baked goods. Last year the plan was to carve a Dinosaur out of brownies but as usual, the brownies were a complete fail due to our oven. So this year I decided to try again but with cake!

I used this recipe from The Caked Crusader and it was delicious! The sponge kept moist for days which was good because I had loads of cake left!

Ingredients:

225g unsalted butter, at room temperature
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
225g self raising flour
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
150ml milk

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees.

2. Line two 20cm cake tins with greaseproof paper.

3. Cream together the sugar and butter until pale and fluffy.

4. Slowly add in the eggs one at a time.

5. Add in the flour, cocoa and the milk.

6. Spoon the batter into the cake tins.

7. Bake the cakes for around 50 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the sponge comes out clean.

8. Leave the cakes to cool slightly in their tins before turning out onto a wire rack.

It's a delicious chocolate cake recipe, so if you just want a simple chocolate cake whip this up and add some buttercream to sandwich in the middle. Or, use it as a basis for a dinosaur as I did!

I got my template here! I think it's from Betty Crocker but I could also be imagining that! Simply print out and cut out the templates, and after your cake is cooled we're ready to go!

Now I must admit here that my cake was a little small for the template, so I just trimmed the template a little in order to make it fit. Then I placed the template on top of the sponge and with a sharp knife cut out my template.

I then made some green tinged vanilla buttercream to stick the head and tail to the body and also to the board before doing a crumb coat! A crumb coat is basically a thin coat of buttercream to seal in the crumbs. It was my first go at this so I was quite pleased! From my research on the web, most reccomend putting the cake in the freezer so the crumb coat sets but I didn't have enough room in my freezer and not a lot of time either, so I cleared a shelf in the fridge and left him in there for half an hour.

I then made some darker green vanilla buttercream and slathered it all other my dinosaur. I then used chocolate drops and chocolate and white buttons to decorate. 

I was really sad to cut up my dinosaur! I thought he looked quite cute! But, he had to go join his other dinosaurs in extinction...