Dinorawr!

How many dinosaurs do you see on this cake? You might have to look close to see all three in their natural habitat of fondant grass, leaves and polka dots!

I used fondant with tylose powder for the these dinos. I filled the molds to the top and cleaned the edges of the mold by removing any excess.  Place the mold in the freezer for about five minutes and they  will pop out very easily. I brushed with  pearl dust to bring out the detail on the tiny ones.

The cookies were a nice size for the favor boxes which I picked up at Michael's. Cookie tiles seem to be a popular trend. These little dinos are the perfect size for them. This is about a 1 inch square cutter.

The cookies are decorated with royal icing. Party City carries sixlets in EVERY color.

Volcano cake pops were actually easier to dip than round ones. I worried they would fall off the stick but I did not have any trouble with that. I dipped the stick in chocolate and pushed it halfway into the pop and covered completely. The advantage of plastic sticks is that they can be wiped off if  any chocolate should drip onto them.

I put a small handful of orange melting chocolate wafers into a disposable pastry bag with a pinch of paramount crystals and melted on half power until melted. Be sure to take the bag out and squeeze the bag to distribute the heat evenly during melting.  Cut a small hole off the the tip of the bag and pipe some orange lava on the pop.

Repeat with yellow chocolate.

Use the pastry bag of melted chocolate to attach the molded dinos!

Did you know you can  use the deeper molds for making cookies?

Fill the mold and freeze for about 3 minutes and place on a parchment lined cookie tray.

Bake at 325 for 10 - 12 minutes. Watch carefully, remove when the cookie looks dry and just before it begins to brown. I used a Wilton Roll-Out Cookie Recipe from an old year book. It is not necessary to add the 2 teaspoons of baking powder because you do not want it to rise so I omitted it.

Roll-Out Cookies

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups flour

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar with a hand held mixer. Beat in egg and vanilla. Mix in flour one cup at a time, mixing after each addition. Divide dough into small bowls and add several drops of gel food coloring to each bowl. Knead in the coloring with your hands until evenly distributed.  No need to chill dough before using, but if you are working with several colors, you may want to refrigerate the dough you are not using.

Vendor Credits:  Party Styling and Desserts by Jeannie GearinThepastrytip.com

Jeannie's Facebook Page

Products Used:

Mini Dinosaurs

Dino #6

Dino #8

Dinosaur Molds

Some of my favorite posts are those for the Kiddo's -- and this one in particular makes me think of my wonderful Niece Chloe and her love for dinosaurs.  She wanted Dino molds, so these were created for her - Plus they make a wonderful addition to the store!  Thank Robin for such a fun and creative project.
 

For my Children's themed project I received 4 adorable dinosaurs. My first thought went straight to the volcano themed cake but I wanted to do something different. I remembered a merry go round kit I received for Christmas and thought how cute it would be to make a prehistoric Merry Go Round cake topper.

Using DTC molds are super easy. In fact as I was working on this project I did it with a broken wrist. Although I wasn't able to put as much detail on the finished project as I would like I was able to make the dinos with one hand proving how easy a DTC mold can be!

To begin you will need your DTC molds, a mat for working on, fondant in various dino colors, and a sharp cutting instrument. For decorating you can use an airbrush, luster dust, ground up chalk, or even cocoa powder.

Start by taking a small amount of fondant and pushing it into the mold.

Push fondant into mold and remove excess around edges and push toward the inside of the mold. For what I was using the dinos for I made sure the back of the mold was level and flat.

If you don't remove excess before un molding your dino will look like this.

You can then use your sharp knife to cut along edges and remove extra fondant.

This is what all four of the dinos look like before I colored them.

For this dino I used cocoa powder. I just took a small amount and brushed it on with a paint brush. I then took a clean brush and removed excess powder so that remaining powder made a shadow effect in the creases.

This dino I highlighted the light green fondant with a darker green airbrush color to give it more dimension.

This dino started out cream color and with a bit of green and dark brown airbrush this was the end result.

This dino began with dark green fondant and I added brown airbrush color.

The three airbrushed dinos

For the topper it is the Wilton Carousel kit. A gift I received for x mas and figured I wouldn't get much use out of it but I think this prehistoric dino go round is perfect for a little boys birthday. Again if I had both hands I would have loved to put more detail on the carousel maybe even some little saddles with stirrups! I attached the dinos with melted chocolate. You could easily make these cute dinos with chcolate.

DTC Products Used:

Dino #1

Dino #2

Dino #3

Dino #4