Dinosaur Par-Tay

dinosaur cake

After a full year of dinosaur obsession, Brayden decided he wanted to have a dinosaur themed party for the big #4!  Shocking!!!  Now... Brayden doesn't have a favorite dinosaur show, or even dinosaur.  He just loves all things dinosaur.  He loves big scary dinosaurs, small baby dinosaurs, dinosaur eggs, dinosaur fossils, dinosaur nests... you get the idea.  So, that gave me a lot to work with, and of course, I wanted to try to incorporate everything.  Again, I always like to start with my cake idea, and go from there.  I do a lot of buttercream cakes, although I LOVE the look of fondant, I hate the fact that most people peel it off, don't eat it, and toss it in the garbage.  I know I do!  So, I've been practicing a lot, on making smooth buttercream cakes.  It's an obsession.  I think I did O.K. on smoothing the dinosaur cake, but I could have done a lot better. Below are a few pics of my dinosaur cake creation process.  This was a total of 3.5 hours.

 For the bottom of the cake I used 9 inch cake pans, and created 3 layers filled with chocolate pudding.  I leveled the top of the cake, stacked and iced.  The cake was from a box, the buttercream was from scratch.

just keep icing

I made the top layers of the cake using a 6 inch cake pan.  This was also 3 layers.  I used a 6 inch round cake board, and straws I made Scott take from Starbucks, to support the cake.  (Starbucks has great straws, they are thick, and do not bend).  You can see the cake board in the above picture, but eventually it was covered with icing.  There are 4 straws under the board, going through the bottom cake to support the top layer. 

After icing the cake, and used ABC fondant cutters, to make his name out of bright orange Wilton fondant.  Because the buttercream was fresh, the fondant letters stick right to it. 

 I made the dinosaurs with fondant too.  I cut the fondant with dinosaur cookie cutters, and added some fondant spikes, spots and eyes.

The volcano was the final piece.  I just used a small pyrex backing dish and when the cake was cooled, I cut around the top to make it rounded like a volcano.  Red buttercream piped down the sides to look like lava. 

We held this party at a local park building.  The picture above, is a dinosaur "cave" with a nest inside.  The cave is streamers hung from rope.  Inside the cave is the nest made from long pieces of brown packaging paper.  There are spotted balloon dinosaur eggs and blow up dinsaurs.  ROAR!

dinosaur nest and eggs

tar pit!

To get into the dinosaur cave, we played a game where they had to jump over the "tar pit". Scott tossed dinosaur egg balloons out, and the kids had to run around and retrieve them, without falling into the pit!

kids running around collecting the dinosaur eggs!

I also created small dinosaur eggs, follow this recipe but instead of usIing coffee, I used dirt.  If you use too much water they will take a really long time to dry out...like days, so give yourself plenty of time.  At the party we hid the eggs, the kids had to find them, and then hammer them open to find the small plastic Dollar Store dinosaur inside.  This activity was a huge hit with the littles!!

finding dinosaur eggs

smashing them open!

I tried to make the food dinosaur themed too.  We had dino shaped chicken fingers, dino shaped PB&J sandwiches (made by daddy), and colors of food that matched the party.  The banner I made with scrapbook paper, dinosaur die-cuts, and letters printed of a Word document. 

dino nuggets

dino PB&J

Happy Dino-sauring- Erin