Dinosaur cake

On 1st September we celebrated our boy's 3rd Birthday with family and friends. We had great fun playing outdoors and doing barbecue. Its amazing how kids can be happy of the smallest things. Just let them run around in the playground and they can have fun for hours.

For this birthday I decided to make a dinosaur cake. I started planning it months ago. The hardest part was to decide how it would look. I liked the idea from Pinterest of using small toy dinosaurs as decoration hence less work for me :) As flavors I choose tropical papaya-mango filling and to cover the cake dark chocolate filling. The idea for the fillings was from fellow blogger Kinuskikissa and also I used her 70% cake base receipe (see links below in finnish).

In addition I made a vegan cocoa cake for those with allergies. It had to be without milk, eggs and gluten so I looked for some ideas from Pinterest and made my own version. It turned out very nice and both cakes received a lot compliments from our guests. I will make a separate post on the vegan cake later.

Happy baking :)

Dinosaur cake

Base

For this cake I made the base with 7 eggs with following amounts: 7 eggs = weight 350g
sugar 0,7x350g= 245g
flour 0,7x350g= 245g of which 70% is white baking flour 0,7x245g=171g and rest 30% is potato flour (corn starch could work as well) 0,3x245g=74g.
1 tea spoon of baking powder
1-2 table spoons of cocoa powder

Butter and crumb baking pans with bread crumbs. I used two pans; one size 25cm pan and one 23cm pan. This makes 2 cakes with each 1 filling in between. The 3rd top layer I made after on a smaller pan with 2 eggs and using the same formula above. Preheat oven to 175C.

Using a mixer beat the sugar and eggs together until fluffy and doubled in volume (at least 10-15 minutes of mixing). Then mix flour, baking powder, cocoa powder together and sift into the egg mixture, use a spatula to gently mix together. To make this cake fluffy and soft you need to beat the eggs well together and mix the flour in very carefully. If you mix too much when adding the flour the cake will be very dense or even hard.

Pour the batter into a baking pan and bake for about 35 minutes or until cake tester/toothpick comes out clean. Let the cakes cool while you make the fillings.

Tropical filling

3 ½ dl  heavy whipping cream
350 g papaya puree
200 g mango curd (or greek yogurt)
1-2 table spoons of lemon juice
200 g white chocolate

With a mixer whip the heavy cream until cream is forming peaks. Mix together papaya puree, mango curd and lemon juice. Melt the white chocolate in a microwave or carefully on the stove on low heat mixing all the time.  Add the chocolate to the papaya mix and then combine with whipped cream. Let it set for a while in the refrigerator.

Dark chocolate filling

4 dl whipping cream
200 g cream cheese
260 g dark baking chocolate (70% cocoa)

With a mixer whip the heavy cream until cream is forming peaks and mix in the cream cheese. Melt the chocolate in a microwave or carefully on the stove on low heat mixing all the time. Add carefully to the whipped cream.

Cut the cakes to 2-3 layers. Place one layer of cake on a platter, moisten with milk, top with tropical filling. Place another layer of cake on top and repeat until you are done filling all the layers.

Cover the cakes with dark chocolate filling. A good tip is to make thin layer first and then refrigerate. Once set make add another layer of the chocolate filling to make it look nice and smooth.

Because of the size of the cakes I had difficulties of lifting the other on top of the other. So I put the smaller cake in the freezer for a while and then could lift it on top of the bigger one. The chocolate filling acts like clue keeping the cakes together. Because it has a lot of chocolate it becomes solid in the fridge. If this happens you can melt it on the stove by heating some water and putting the bowl on top of it for a while.

Once you have assembled the cake, place it in the fridge for few hours. I made the cakes ready the day before for the flavors to set and then did the decoration the next day.  For decoration I used chocolate sticks and salt sticks as the woods, green sukaatti (type of lemon dried and diced) and chocolate halva as the gravel and stones, mint leaves as bushes and toy dinosaurs to get the jungle look.

Original receipes from Kinuskikissa
White chocolate mango filling - https://www.kinuskikissa.fi/mango-valkosuklaatayte/
Chocolate filling - https://www.kinuskikissa.fi/helppo-ja-hyva-suklaatayte/
70% cake base - https://www.kinuskikissa.fi/70-kakkupohja/