A cute and easy dinosaur cake that even a beginner can make!

Little Man had his 4th birthday this summer.  For about a month before his birthday, he was coming up with ideas of what kind of cake he wanted.  A train, a dinosaur, cars-- you name it, he came up with it.  Finally, about a week before his birthday I had to pin him down on what he wanted me to make, and he finally decided on a dinosaur cake.

I'm not the type of person to buy a cake pan for each different shape.  That's too expensive, plus what are the odds I would use the same pan again?  So it just seems a bit wasteful to me.  But if you'd rather buy a pan, here's one that's cute.

Instead, I decided to bake a 13x9 cake, and chop it up to make a dinosaur.  Our cake happened to be chocolate, but you can make any kind of cake you'd like.  Just bake the cake like you usually would, and then invert it onto parchment paper that is cut larger than your cake.

I'll admit, I was a bit nervous about cutting into the cake, but I made a paper template to make sure that it would work, and then I went for it.

Here's the paper template so you can see how to do it.  By flipping several pieces around, you're left with a larger cake than if you tried to get the entire dinosaur cake out of the 13x9 shape.

After cutting out the dinosaur cake and flipping around the head and tail, I let the cake sit for a couple of hours.  If you don't let it sit, you will end up with a lot of cake crumbs in your frosting.

(I apologize this isn't a great picture, I just want you to see how the dinosaur cake was constructed.)

I made a green cream cheese frosting.  Then I decorated the dinosaur cake.  I used chocolate melts for the spots.  I got the chocolate melts in the bulk food section, so I only had to buy what I wanted for the cake.  If you don't want to use chocolate melts, you could use chocolate chips for smaller spots.  Just turn them upside down and push the pointy part into the cake.  I used a chocolate chip upside down for the eye, so you can see how that would look.

I sprinkled colored sprinkles (also from the bulk section) around the edges to make the cake more fun.  After sprinkling, I tilted the pan and all the sprinkles that didn't stick slid off.

Finally, I used a gel cake decorating pen in red to make the smile.  I attempted to use a sparkly green one first, but you couldn't see it very well, so I added the red.

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📖 Recipe

DIY Dinosaur Cake

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Prep Time 30 minutes

Cook Time 20 minutes

Total Time 50 minutes

Ingredients

• 13x9 Cake, any flavor
• Frosting, colored with green food dye
• Chocolate Melts
• Colored Sprinkles
• Gel Cake decorating tube, red

Instructions

1. Bake cake according to directions.
2. Let cool.
3. Cut cake up using template. Let sit for about an hour before frosting.
4. Frost.
5. Decorate according to blog instructions.

Little Man loved it!  I was so happy with how it turned out, and I loved that this dinosaur cake was easy!  Just bake, cut, frost, and throw a bunch of decorations on!

Check out these other cute kid cakes:

Lion Cake

Dora Cake

Hello Kitty Cake

Construction Cake

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