Dinosaur Ruffle Celebration Cake

Throwing a prehistoric-themed birthday party? You’ll need a cake, of course, and candles, and some dinosaur-y decorations… Straight out of a primeval forest, this frilling cake makes the perfect setting for a horde of marauding monsters.

Step 1 – gather your kit

To decorate your dinosaur cake, you will need:

• • Renshaw White Ready-to-Roll Icing
• • Renshaw White Flower & Modelling Icing Paste
• • Icing Rolling Pin
• • Bulbous cone modelling tool from the PME® Icing Tool Set 
• • Wilton® 5-Piece Cake Decorating Brush Set
• • 8 Wilton® Icing Colours Green or Renshaw Green Ready-to-Roll Icing

Step 2 – bake the base

Because your cake is going to be so fancy on the outside, there’s no need to go to town on the inside – unless you want to, of course… We went with two 7″ (18cm) chocolate sponges, sandwiched and crumb coated with chocolate buttercream and then covered with white ready-to-roll icing.

Step 3 – get ruffled

To make the first of your ruffles, take two golf ball-sized balls of white modelling paste. Knead these together until they’re warm and pliable, then shape into a long sausage. Using a small icing rolling pin, roll this into a very long strip – long enough to wrap round the whole circumference of the cake (for a 7″/ 18cm cake this will need to be 22″/ 56cm long). Cut this strip in half lengthways. Put one of the strips to one side.

Take the other strip and roll a bulbous cone modelling tool all along the uncut edge to thin and ruffle the edge. Add more texture to the edge of the strip by using the pointy end of the tool to make short, quick dragging actions all along the edge.

Step 4 – get stuck in

Use a small decorating brush and a little cooled, boiled water to wet the top 1cm of the side of the cake. Attach your ruffled strip to the cake, with the cut edge at the bottom and the ruffled edge slightly overlapping the top of the cake. Ruffle the other strip in the same way and attach it to the cake below the first strip, and so that it partly overlaps it.

Step 5 – go green

To make your first green ruffles, take another two golf-sized balls of white modelling paste, but this time add in either a drop of green food colouring or a pea-sized amount of green ready-to-roll icing. Knead thoroughly to create a very light shade of green. Roll out, cut, ruffle and attach these pale green strips to your cake as you did the white ones, adding each a little further down the sides.

For each subsequent strip, add increasing amounts of green colouring or icing to make the shade darker each time. Work your way down the cake until you reach the bottom.

Step 6 – finishing touches

We rolled together a little black and white ready-to-roll icing to make the ‘boulders’ for round the bottom of our bake, topped it with a layer of crushed Oreos then added some Dinosaur Cake Candles. 

Looking for more fun ferocious ways to furnish a feast? Check out our Dinosaur Swiss Roll Cake and Dinosaur Face Bakes step-by-steps.