I found this Dino Dig site cake idea in the March ’09 Family Fun magazine, and I just HAD to try it! I think it turned out great, and I so hope my son wants a dinosaur birthday party next so I can make it again!
I made a chocolate sheet cake and covered it with chocolate buttercream icing. The icing doesn’t have to be perfect, because you then cover the whole cake with crushed chocolate graham crackers. It works best to put the graham crackers in a Ziploc bag and run a rolling pin over the bag to crush.
Use your hands to cover the top and sides of the cake with the crumbs. For the boarder just break off small and medium pieces of graham cracker and push them down into the cake all the way around.
The dino bones are sugar cookies. You can go to familyfun.com/magazine for the template. Just search for the “Dinosaur Dig Site” cake. After rolling out the chilled cookie dough, I used a regular steak knife to cut around the bone templates. Bake the cookies and then arrange them on top of the cake. The final step is to sprinkle a few crumbs over the dino bones. It’s that easy!
I use Wilton’s buttercream icing:
1 cup vegetable shortening
1 cup butter or margarine
2 tsp vanilla
2 lbs powdered sugar
1+ tbs milk to thin
add 1 and 1/2 cups cocoa for chocolate
*Live & Learn*
I had a hard time finding the chocolate graham crackers for this cake. If you can’t find them, it’s okay to use regular graham crackers, Oreo’s, vanilla waffers or any other brown cookie. Dirt comes in all different shades, so get creative!
This looks so awesome!!! you make it sound so easy too, I will try this for sure, thank you!!
Thanks for the idea!