If history repeats itself, I'm totally getting a dinosaur.

After nearly having a nervous breakdown while making my "Connect It" cake, I swore never to try to carve a complex pattern into a cake using a stanley knife again. Of course, being a glutton for punishment (and someone who thinks a pet dinosaur would be awesome), I just had to do this design, and it had to look good. So I pulled out my sponge cake recipe, my stanley knife and my pins (I now owe my mother a new set of sewing pins, her old ones are now cake-pins) and got ready for another two evenings of resiting throwing the cake against the wall in frustration.

Making the cake itself was a cinch. A Victoria sponge made from scratch with plenty of butter, sugar and vanilla. With the amount of cakes I've made in the past few weeks, it now takes a lot of persuasion to get my family to eat even more of it). Once the cake was ready for carving, I cut out a template of the design and pinned it to the cake.

Now for the fun part - the carving. It wasn't as difficult this time as I'd learned from the mistakes of a previous entry. I managed to get through the whole thing without stabbing myself at all (accidentally or intentionally). There were a few tricky bits where the lettering was small and it was difficult to keep the raised bits attached to the cake. A few pieces fell off, but they were easily reattached with some glace icing.
I made the mouth slightly sunken to give a more realistic effect and also to leave room for the teeth.
Next up - decorating the cake. I mixed two batches of thick glace icing in different shades of green and went to town on the lettering. Piping thick icing isn't my favourite thing to do, but it was necessary to ensure it didn't run down the sides. Unfortunately, the piping tube I was using is at least 70 years old (it was my grandmother's), and pushing down hard to get the icing out had a tendency to cause the lid to pop off, resulting in my stabbing the cake with the tip. This happened A LOT. After a few patch-up jobs with more icing, the lettering was done. I decided to leave the icing to set overnight, and came back the next evening to do the background (piping some slightly runny glace icing into the cracks) and the mouth with even more glace icing.

After some pondering, I decided to make the teeth out of white chocolate, so I put my template under some parchment and shaped some melted white chocolate accordingly. I had to add roots to the teeth to ensure that the unsupported teeth wouldn't fall out of the cake. Once they were set, they fit into the mouth perfectly and ended up quite realistic (and tasty).

It was a tough cake to decorate and I nearly gave up a few times, but I think it turned out awesome. Unfortunately, the weight of all the icing caused the cake to sink a little, so it was denser than I'd like, but it still looked and tasted great, and that's what that matters