It was the first of his birthdays where he had plans / expectations - we’ve been working on a birthday list since about March. Also the first one with no limit on allowing him to have cake any more, really. So I wanted to do a good cake. Last year was a truck, he was into cars. This year I decided it should be a dinosaur… which sounded like a big challenge! But then I hit on the idea of making a stegosaurus with biscuits as plates, and all of a sudden a plan came together and I felt like it was on… So I made a stegosaurus cake.
The cake is the chocolate marble Bundt from my German baking book (Luisa Weiss - Classic German Baking). I’d been wanting to try the marble cake for ages so I could use the Bundt tin again, but then for this purpose I actually baked it in a loaf tin and springform tin to give more sculptable pieces. I added a bit of green gel colouring to the white parts, otherwise followed the recipe.
I think it might be a good idea to use Bundt cake recipes for 3D sculpted cakes - Bundt recipes tend to be quite dense and good at holding shape. I've not easily found tasty-sounding recipes that I’m confident would hold their shape before - weirdly most cake recipes don't mention whether they are good for sculpting.
The biscuits are chocolate gingerbread from here. I made the full quantity of dough but it was too much so I froze half. Even a half quantity was too much - a quarter would have been enough to make the stegosaurus-plates! But I was glad to have spares / different ones to choose from.
The icing was my favourite cream cheese icing, which has featured on every s birthday cake so far!
For the biscuits:
Heat oven to 180C. Beat together flour, cocoa, ginger, butter and sugar until you can’t see any lumps of butter. Dribble in the syrup and beat to a smooth dough.
Take
about half of the dough at a time and roll out between 2 sheets of
baking paper to the thickness of a £1 coin. Peel away the top layer
of paper and cut shapes, using a small knife to cut around your paper templates. Peel away the trimmings and lift the shapes onto baking paper on a baking tray. Roll some shapes for the spikes as well - again, remember you are aiming for 2 matching pairs. When you have used all the dough and have plenty of shapes, put in the oven and bake for 12-13 min until firm (they catch easily because of the syrup and it's hard to spot because of the cocoa - be careful!). Take out and let cool for 10 min, then move to a rack to finish cooling, before storing in an airtight box until needed.
For the cake:
(do the day before or earlier the same day - needs to cool before assembly)
Heat oven to 180C. Butter and flour the cake tins (I used one round springform and one loaf tin).
Put the chocolates in two separate bowls and heat in the microwave in 30 sec bursts, stirring every so often, until melted. I found the white chocolate took much longer to melt, but we got there eventually. Set aside til needed.
Beat the butter in a large bowl with the sugar and salt until light and fluffy. Beat in the vanilla and the eggs, one at a time, until well combined.
In a separate, medium bowl, mix the flour and baking powder with a fork. Then beat the flour into the egg mixture. Scrape one third of the batter back into the flour bowl. Add the white chocolate to the larger portion of batter, along with green food colouring, and mix until no streaks remain. Add the melted dark chocolate, cocoa and milk to the remaining one-third of batter and mix until no streaks remain.
Scrape half the white batter into the bottoms of the prepared cake tins. Then put in all the dark batter. Then put the rest of the white batter on top. Swirl with the blade of a knife to marble, and flatten the tops. Bake for 30-45 min, until a skewer comes out clean. Start checking at 30 min. My round cake took 30 min, and my loaf cake took about 40 min.
Place the tins on a rack and let cool for 10 min before unmolding and letting it cool upside down. Let cool completely. Keep in the fridge, wrapped in clingfilm, until needed - good for a few days.
For the icing:
Beat the butter on its own first, until smooth. Add the cream cheese and beat some more. Add the sugar to taste, and the green food colouring until you like the colour. Chill until needed (should be OK in the fridge for a day or so) / until the texture is good for decorating.
Assembly and decoration:
Build the dinosaur shape: I used the middle part of a round cake (baked in springform pan) for the bottom part of the body. Then made the top part of the body from most of the loaf cake (loaf pan). Most of the rest of the loaf cake became the head, and the edges of the round cake were good for the tail (naturally curved) and legs (matching pairs). A few gaps needed filling with offcuts, but in general it's good to stick to as few pieces as possible to avoid crumbs that get in the icing, and bits falling off. It worked surprisingly well.
When the shape looks OK, put a layer of icing all over to fill in small gaps. I prefer a relatively thin layer of icing so there were a few escaped chocolate crumbs in it, but I figured for a dinosaur's skin that was OK. And then I also sprinkled on some cocoa powder to add some more dinosaur-y texture / dirt anyway.
I used a couple of mini m+m type sweets for the eyes, and cut small holes in the icing through to the dark cake inside for nostrils. Finally, I stuck in the biscuit plates and spikes.
Wait til as close to serving as possible to decorate, especially to
stick in the biscuits - I did it all the night before and the biscuits
softened overnight, and a couple of them flopped over and had to be rescued
with extra icing. Although actually I quite liked the taste of the softer biscuits.
