Happy 5th Birthday Ian!

As mentioned in my previous post, I volunteered to make a dino cake after watching a video on how to make it at howdini.com. Now, this is the real deal. Ian's mummy saw the try-out i did, the green chubby one and showed Ian to see if he likes it. Just when i thought maybe i should make it in his favorite colour, Ian's mummy told me he wanted it in his fav colour, purple. hmm..now..isn't that barney? *shrugs* haha. He added, "the neck's too short, can it be made longer?" a little puzzled at what he meant, i went to re-look at my picture and kinda burst out laughing to myself. See the comparison of the try-out dino (green) Vs the real deal. Having gained pretty disasterous experiences from making the green dino, i tried my best to avoid the same mistakes. But still, i was working a little too slow, and couldn't manage to smooth the frosting perfectly. I've learnt to accept cake imperfections as I've found out that, the more i try to make it good, the more unexpected accidents happen. i.e. i frosted the tail perfectly and when i move on to frost the legs, my hand somehow twitched and knocked the tail. *cries and wails*

The try-out was done using 6" cakes while the real one was done using 8" cakes. The "bigger" cake area probably made it a teeny weeny bit easier to frost too. After watching the video upteen times and looking at my horrible overweight green dino (which has a non-existent neck and chubby fat tail) I modified the original templates in such a way that it'd fit look like a nice dino in the end. The cake comprises of 2 layers of velvety chocolate cake (which was a great choice cos the guests loved the taste) sandwiched with strawberries and mango (i know it's a weird combi but there's another story to how it arrived at strawberries and mango) and covered in white chocolate swiss meringue buttercream coloured purple of course. I'm pretty happy with the swiss meringue buttercream as D commented that it's less over-buttery like the italian meringue buttercream, and not as sweet! =DD

Blaming on my poor time management, i didn't manage to look for the big choc buttons and hence used mini oreos to replace them. The medium sized spots were normal m&ms and the small sized spots were mini m&ms. The spikes of course, were hershey's kisses. =p Coming to the eyes, a slight discussion with my sister on her opinion as the green one looked..hmm..scary? We finally decided on using the mini m&ms placed close to each other. As for the mouth, a slight debate on whether to make it a cute smiley one, or *roar* fiercer dino. We decided on a cute small mouth to minimize the potential mistakes that could happen while trying to position the spikey teeth =p I myself gave the reason that, we wouldn't want Ian to be a fierce boy rite? =X oh! and the toes! they were studded with 3 normal m&ms =)

As i didn't have time to go down to IMM to get a bigger cake board and the largest in phoon huat and sun lik is 16" x 16", i just had to settle with that. This explains why the cake is at in angle =p Well, i'm glad it was so, if not, it wouldnt be able to fit in my fridge haha! the top area seemed bare, so i decided to cut out some fondant letters spelling "Happy Birthday Ian" and of course, topped the cute smiley dino with a fondant party hat =) Sadly, I don't have pictures of the innards of the cake but the frosting thickness this time was good! not too thick nor thin about o.7cm thick? =)

I was still pretty worried about the cake thinking it could have been better. But after compring my trial version and the real deal, i guess it wasn't so bad after all huh..More importantly, I hope Ian liked the cake. =)