Dinosaurs ROAR!

I'm a girly girl, I like pink, glitter, fairies, cutesy anything, sugar and spice, the lot!     Don't you agree?  The dynamics of having a little boy really changes a lot for a girly girl like me, especially when this little boy LOVES Thomas the train, cars, legos, transformers and DINOSAURS!!!!  Which little boy doesn't right?

As Daniel's birthday was fast approaching, he really wanted at first a Transformer Optimus Prime cake and like most good mums would do trying to please and give everything our little ones heart desires, I researched how to make an Optimus Prime cake..there are some really good ones out there.  This one took the cake! check this out...

Well, I wasn't about to top that especially when I've never fondant a cake before but a few design ideas did came to mind.  I searched online for Autobot cookie cutters, spent 5 hours looking on youtube learning how to cover cakes using fondant.  Just a week before the big day,  Daniel decided he wanted a Dinosaur cake instead! 😱 So back to the drawing board, I started looking for dinosaur cutters instead and  began redesigning the cake.  Thankfully the 5 hour lessons on youtube wasn't a complete waste of time.

We sat down together and I had all these ideas of how I was going to decorate the cake but before I could even pick up a colouring pen, I was told to draw a blue cake with chocolate dinosaurs, he wanted a dark blue number 5 candle, a ROAR sign and Happy Birthday bunting!! The boy knows what he wants! Five minutes later, we got ourselves a sketch of his Dinosaur cake design...

We went from this...

to this...

I must say, I'm pretty happy and relieved (phew) with the result, especially for a first timer and more importantly, Daniel was wrapped!  Best of all, it was delicious too! 😋  The recipe is from a friend who made the cake for me once and it had stuck with me as one of the nicest chocolate cakes I've tasted.  I'll like to share her recipe with you, she said it's foolproof... 😜

Brigitte's Special Chocky Cake:

2C plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 1/3 tsp baking soda

3/4C cocoa

2C sugar

120g melted butter

2 beaten eggs

1C milk

1C coffee (liquid) - I omitted this since it was a kids bday cake ~ still tasted delish!

1 tbsp vanilla essence

Preheat oven 180C

Place dry ingredients in bowl.

Add remaining wet ingredients - I do all the warm ingredients first, i.e. melted butter, coffee, then milk, eggs and essence. That way the mixture doesn't go lumpy. The mixture should be super slushy ; )

Pour in large cake tin, bake about 45mins.

*You can make muffins with this recipe. Also, I tend to only put 1 3/4C sugar instead of 2C cos I add real chocolate icing.  

*Chocolate icing is half chocolate, half unsalted butter e.g 125g each and melt. The chocolate the kids like is the Whittaker's 50% cocoa.

Enjoy!!

xx