Dinosaur Cake

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 170ºC/340ºF fan. Grease a 20cm/8inch round cake tin with butter and line the base with a circle of baking paper.
• Make the cake
• Mix the butter, sugar and salt together with a hand whisk or stand mixer at medium speed for about 3-5 minutes. It should be smoother and lightened in colour.
• Add the eggs, self-raising flour, baking powder and milk to the butter and sugar. Mix until just fully combined into a batter without streaks of butter.
• Add the cake mix to the lined cake tin, level the top with the back of a spoon and bake for 15-20minutes, until lightly golden ontop, and a skewer inserted into the middle of the sponge comes out clean.
• Leave to cool for about 10 minutes in the tin, before running a knife around the edge of the tin and removing the cake from the tin. Once cooled to room temperature, place the cake in the fridge to chill. This will help make shaping and icing easier.
• Make the buttercream
• Use a padel attachment on a stand mixer or an electric hand whisk to beat the butter and salt at medium speed for at least 5 minutes, until it becomes very smooth and considerably lighter in colour (the butter should be very soft to help this work).
• Stream in the condensed milk whilst beating the butter. You should take about 1 minute to add all the condensed milk whilst mixing. Alternatively, you can add about 1/4 of the condensed milk, then mix for about 20 seconds and repeat this until you have used all of the condensed milk.
• Take about 3 tablespoons of the buttercream and colour it black with the food colouring. Colour the remaining large portion of the buttercream green.
• Cut the dinosaur shape
• Cut the cake in the pattern show in the photo at the top of the webpage. You should get out two legs, two arms, a body and a head.
• When cutting the head, you should make it slightly wider than the body by beginning the cut over the halfway point of the cake.
• Decorate the dinosaur
• Use a little buttercream to stick the arms, legs and head onto the body of the dinosaur. One arm should go in front of the body and one arm should go ontop of the middle of the body. The back of the head (flat side) should line up with the spine of the body and the front of the head should stick out slightly beyond the front of the body.
• Cover the entire cake with the green buttercream. If you want the cake to be very neat, you can first do a “dirty ice” layer by spreading a very thin layer of buttercream over the cake before chilling it in the fridge for 30 minutes. This will keep in the crumbs before you put on a thicker second coating of icing, but is not necessary. It is best to use a small palette knife spread this over the cake – just pretend you are buttering toast.
• Once you have covered the cake in the green buttercream, use the tip of your palette knife to create rough texture over the cake to make it look scaly (and to cover up messy icing!).
• Place the black buttercream into a piping bag. Cut a small hole in the bag and pipe around the border of the cake to make an outline and pipe a small line for the dinosaur’s eye (this is an optional step).
• Use some colourful sweets to give the dinosaur some cool spikes!