Adventures in Cake Decorating #13 - Dinosaur Cake and Cookies

Three years after I made it, let me tell you about this dinosaur cake and cookies. It's a good example of combining two simple decorating components into one impressive overall look -- a frosting petal technique and cutout sugar cookies.

Sure, the dinosaur-shaped cookies on their own could suffice as a dino-themed party treat. There was indeed a plate of the dinosaur cookies served alongside the cake. But, by using the cookies as part of the cake's decoration, an otherwise nondescript (albeit colorful) cake got a thematic upgrade with a fun edible topper.

The color theme came from the party invitation or its paper decorations. I'm pretty certain the idea for the frosting "scales" look came from the images of cakes my sister-in-law sent me for inspiration. You know, the standard "I like this. Can you do it?" text messages that occur before each birthday. It was a new technique for me, and one I haven't used again but would like to.

To create these buttercream petals/scales, you pipe a vertical line of fat dots and then smear them to the side with a small offset spatula or the back of a spoon. Pipe your next line of dots over the tail of the previous line. When you've come full circle around the cake and make the final row of dots, you won't be able to smear it underneath the first set for an infinite overlap. Just smear enough to close the gap and make that the backside of your cake! You could of course pipe these petals/scales all in a single color simply for the interesting texture or arrange multiple colors in any other pattern.

For the cookies, just pick your favorite sugar cookie recipe, preferably one intended for cutouts, meaning it won't rise or spread very much while baking. My go-to sugar cookie icing is just powdered sugar, vanilla extract, and milk, combined in that order and starting with as little milk as possible, adding no more than a tablespoon of milk at a time until the icing is the consistency you need.

There are a couple of things I would do differently if I was making this cake again, and they both have to do with neatness.

1. I would have baked a few of the sugar cookies on sticks (like cookie lollipops), which I could then just poke down into the cake to hold the cookies more neatly upright on top of the cake, rather than nesting the cookies in little piles of frosting. (I guess these dinos look like they're trudging forward through a swamp.)
2. I would have been more patient when decorating the cookies so each base icing color was fully dry before I tried adding the icing accents (eyes, spots, etc.), which would prevent color seepage and help with neater, more defined details on the cookies.

We can take a brief look at the baking of this cake, in which pure happenstance resulted in rave reviews from those eating it. Something was wrong with the oven. The two 8-inch chocolate rounds were taking forever to bake. It turned out to be fudgiest cake I'd ever made, thanks to cooking low and slow and probably being a bit underdone. I also was running out of frosting ingredients and didn't want to make a late-night run to the store. I stretched what little chocolate frosting I had (for between the cake's layers) by whipping some heavy cream into the buttercream base. It whipped up fluffy and cool, and people thought it was delicious.

In addition to finding a reason to pipe petal-scales onto another cake because they look cool, I am also on the lookout for more opportunities to incorporate decorated sugar cookies into celebrations because I have so many cookie cutters I haven't used yet -- playing card suits, sports items, air/land/sea transportation, several holiday shapes... 

These are some of my previous cake-cookie combos:

Bowling cake – sugar cookie bowling pins bursting behind a bowling ball cake (baked in a bowl)

WordWorld cake – a few animals made of letters (it makes sense if you've seen the show) served beside the cake

Cookie Monster cupcakes – mini chocolate chip cookies in the "mouth" of each Cookie Monster as well as ABC and 123 sugar cookie sets served beside the cake

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A new old furniture thing

Someone was throwing out this cool piece of furniture. Of course we carried it home, where Len got to work refurbishing.

The drawers didn't fit -- they were separating at their corners, and the wood had probably also expanded from humidity or something. Len tightened up the seams and sanded the sides until the drawers once again fit their slots. An interesting thing about the drawers is the type of pulls they have -- I've never seen drawer pulls like these, and they're tacked into place with cotter pins instead of screws.

A drawer front and inside, respectively.

The piece had a naturally distressed appearance thanks to old woodworm holes, and it was already lightly whitewashed in country chic style, but it had a pinkish hue. So, Len redid the finish to our tastes by starting with a dark undercoat and then whitewashing over that.

Tada! I'm not sure if this qualifies as a side table or a half dresser or what, but it's my new favorite unique antique chic thing to collect our random clutter near the front door.

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