Cupcakeasaurus

48 Dinosaur cakes were ordered for Maya's 5th birthday by her gran. I made 24 chocolate and 24 vanilla cakes, and decorated them in a variety of styles.

My favourite ones are the fondant icing dinosaur bones, and the rubble/stones that were made from crushed Oreo and chocolate chip cookies - it was a super-messy job, but a really effective look, I think.

The volcanoes took a lot of debate and experimentation, but apparently they were the most popular design: I should have made more!

Chocolate and vanilla cakes with chocolate and vanilla buttercream, cookie crumbs, fondant icing decorations and shop-bought sugar flowers.


Dem bones


One diplodocus...


...and a whole herd of them.


A sort of Triceratops, complete with Oreo and chocolate chip cookie 'rubble'.


That Oreo rubble got everywhere!


Volcano!



Dino bones, chocolate chip cookie 'boulders' and a wonky palm tree.


I love the bones, they were a last minute design addition, but my favourites, I think. The extra-nice thing about them was that the more broken apart the bones are, the better they look!



Palm trees shedding leaves, before I've even left the house.


The cakes on the stand, ready to party!
I, personally, would have mixed the cakes up on the layers of the stand, and put more than 1 cake on top, but the birthday girl's big brother was art directing this!
I hope they shuffled them round a bit before serving them.

Triple Ginger Cake for a Kung Fu double bill

Thought I'd better bring a contribution to Kung Fu film night, and I'd been looking for an excuse to try this recipe, so I got baking on Saturday morning.

It was quite a lot of cake to eat straight after a take away curry though, next film night I'll make some ice cream instead.

Having said that, it was really nice but VERY gingery- there are some changes I would make to it, but I'll definitely be baking this again.


Dan Lepard's ginger chocolate chip pound cake


Triple Ginger Cake:
ground ginger, crystallised ginger and Green & Blacks dark chocolate with ginger (which is -conveniently- my absolute favourite chocolate)
(thanks for the name suggestion, Paul)


A close up of the icing - it consists only of extra thick double cream and sugar!
I think it's a bit too sweet, especially when I tasted it by itself, the sugar really made my teeth go "eeeeeeeeeee".
I also tried to use the ginger chocolate for decoration, but it has chunks of ginger in, so wasn't so good for drizzling, as much as blobbing. Next time I'll use pure chocolate for decoration, and maybe I would try it with a cream cheese topping.

:-)

Found this here, and it made me smile.