I made this First Try Dinosaur Theme Train Birthday Cake for my 4 yr old girl whose favorite show is Dinosaur Train and got my inspiration from this site and the how-to video by Betty Crocker. This whole cake was made from scratch, except for the candies and licorice and ice cream cone. The ‘island’ is a large sugar cookie, with butter cream icing and coconut grass; more icing in the middle for Carley’s letter cookies; the wheels also sugar cookie and designs made with “scribblers” from the grocery store.
The engine is a homemade orange sponge cake from a Betty Crocker cookbook; one whole recipe made up the engine; so I got a box cake of Angel Food cake for the smaller cars; but Angel food didn’t really hold up as well; too light and fluffy but on the other hand a nice contrast to the more dense sponge cake. All the train parts were made in two loaf pans and cut into desired shapes; for the engine I cut part of the loaf and put it on top of the other part; the round part of the engine was baked in a cleaned bean can lined with parchment paper; icing hides any imperfections. I cut out a little holder for the jelly bean ‘coal’ car and the caboose was kind of a last minute idea – I had an extra cut piece so put it on top of the one ‘car’ part.
The log car is butter pretzels ‘glued’ with a bit of butter icing and additionally kept in place with the green licorice. The track is all wafer cookie and in between the wafers is a bit of brown sugar to look more like ground and an inverted ice cream cone with jam poured on top; sort of looked like a volcano. The 4 dinosaur candles I found at the dollar store and were a nice addition to the whole thing.
This was very time consuming; took me pretty much a whole day to assemble and decorate but it was kind of fun too; would I do something like this again – I don’t know but I wouldn’t mind taking a cake decorating course and trying different things out, like with homemade marshmallow fondant.
Carley chose the colors for the train pieces. There is no smoke stack as the pterodactyl went on top of the engine instead. I also made some dinosaur sugar cookies for the kids to take home; I don’t have dinosaur cookie cutters so I ‘drew’ out the shapes by hand with a sharp knife and they looked really cool. That took a fair bit of time too; Carley got to decorate the cookies but I didn’t take any pictures of them, unfortunately.
Carley loved her cake!!
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