Easy Dinosaur Cake: Birthday Party Ideas for Kids

It’s birthday party time again! I can’t believe we have a five year old in the house already… Where does the time go? 

Anyhow, the theme for this year’s birthday party has been set for a full year, ever since Target cleared out their dinosaur birthday party accessories. We had the plates, the table cloth, the banner, and the ‘goody bag’ (a light-up dinosaur head), so pretty much all that was left to do was make the cake. 

I had the birthday boy do a bit of browsing on Pinterest with me, and we narrowed the dinosaur cake ideas down to these: 

However, since this cake needed to be serve at 2 parties in one day, I chose to go for a sheet cake rather than layer cake. I wanted to use candy rocks, but I couldn’t find a store that carries them right now, so I bought some Twix bites, KitKat bites, and malted milk easter eggs. Plastic dinosaurs are, surprisingly enough, hard to find these days. I ended up finding some Animal Planet dinosaurs on Kijiji, but I found out shortly after that they do sell small dinos in a bag at Party City, FYI. 

I baked 2 9×11 chocolate cakes from this recipe at Rose Bakes and made them into one bigger sheet cake. 

I used this Creamy Chocolate Frosting from AllRecipes (which is, by the way, one of the best chocolate frosting recipes I’ve used in the last few years), though I subbed homo milk for the evaporated, and replaced the vanilla with some Girls Night Out Chocolate Raspberry Truffle. I also doubled the recipe, which gave me just about the right amount for icing the cake and decorating it. I used this vanilla buttercream icing recipe with some green food colouring for the grassy bits. 

The rest was just fun. I put the cake in the freezer for about an hour so that it wouldn’t be quite so crumbly when icing, and I made sure to have a glass of hot water for dipping my knife in once in a while. I don’t have any icing bags right now, so when I was piping the grass, I put the icing into a ziplock bag and snipped a small hole in one of the corners. 

I used a mixture of graham crumbs and oreo cookie crumbs for the sandy path, and Twix bites and KitKat bites as the boulders. After the first party, I just added some grass along the cut side, tossed in a few more boulders, and placed a few more dinos into the scene. voila!

If you’re looking for some more activity and food ideas for a dinosaur birthday party, feel free to check out my Kid’s Birthday Party Ideas Pinterest board – I’ve pinned some great stuff from other bloggers! 

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Jenn vanOosten

I live in Hamilton, Ontario, and love my city. I'm a Netflixer, choral music geek, bookworm, inventor of recipes (I take Artistic Licence on EVERYTHING that I make), wife of one, mother of two, and owner of a neurotic Schnauzer. I respect people who respect others. I love good food that's well done, but my favourite lunch is KD & hotdogs. With ketchup. I'm addicted to Clearance Shopping. I will ALWAYS get the product that I want at the price that I want, eventually.

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