Curious Chocolate Dinosaurs - from Kiwicakes test kitchen

This week marks my daughters last day at preschool. Its hard to believe my baby is off to school so soon! I remember looking forward to my last day at kindy because there was always a playdough 'cake' with candles to blow out - so this edible farewell cake sure will be a step up!

Talia's preschool have been studying dinosaurs this term so I thought I'd stick with that theme for her send-off cake. I was also inspired by the Dinosaur Diorama cake on page 35 of the Wilton 2014 Yearbook. It is glossy and full of new and fun ideas - a great birthday present idea for a crafty friend. .

Here are my finished chocolate dinosaurs. Today I decided to try working with chocolate instead of fondant for a change. I used a pack of Rainbow Chocolate Modelling Paste and within that I had every colour I needed to get creative! A real advantage of working with this medium is that you don't need anything extra above the basic tools that cake decorators start out with. And the taste is divine!

You can also purchase single blocks of Chocolate Modelling Paste from our range of 11 pre-coloured chocolate.

I figure that my cakes audience are going to be harsh critics because boy do those 3 and 4 year olds know their dinosaur facts! I chose to model 5 different animals as she is turning 5 and odd numbers of cake decorations do seem to work best anyway. Before I began playing with the colours, I made a quick plan including the distinguishing anatomical features that they would be looking for in each dinosaur. It may not be pretty (I am no artist!) but it gave me a plan of action to turn into simple shapes...

Using chocolate paste for the first time was a breeze! It moulds well simply with the warmth of your hand and has a nice glossy finish. I created the extra colours I needed (like orange, purple and green) by mixing the existing colours from the rainbow pack together. Eg. Yellow + Blue = Green.

I am planning on constructing a messy, muddy, maltesers-covered chocolate cake base for these bright dinsaurs to inhabit. And hopefully it will go down well with the pre-schoolers! Here are my characters...