Dinosaur Cake

I don't cook. I definately don't bake. I rarely make edible toast. Also, we're vegetarian (i.e. no butter, eggs or milk). 
Today, I'm going to demonstrate how not to make a dino cake.   I'm sure you'll take away lots of great advice. I found the idea for my adorable dino cake here.
Here are some of the ingredients you'll need. Not all of them, because of course I don't bake and forgot a bunch of stuff.  (You'll notice I didn't forget any of the ingredients that start with "c.h.o.c.o.". ) I did completely forget to buy fake butter.  If you start with a cake mix and the required ingredients (listed in pictoral form) right on the box, you'll be doing great.

 After sending Handy Husband to the store for butter, he came home and I promptly announced we were out of egg replacer.  He then sighed deeply and whipped up some egg replacer-  a yogurt and soymilk experiment. (Here's where you can start taking notes- don't experiment with egg replacer on important birthday cakes.)  While the dubious cake mixture was baking, I gathered some chocolate pieces- I unwrapped some Kisses, picked out some brown m&ms, and opened some chocolate candy melts. I was going to open a bag of chocolate chips, too, but thought it might be overkill.

Dubious cake mixture yielded two incredibly sticky 9 inch round cakes.
 

I printed off a dino template from the Betty Crocker website, and got to work carving. 

You'll notice the cakes are still in the pans. Please note that this is a bad idea. You should get your cakes out of the pans before cutting.  (My delicious cakes wouldn't come out, so I had to hack them out, piece by piece as I went.)

Prying my cakes out of the pan required a knife, a spatula and a lot of cursing.  (My cake was, in fact so sticky, the templates stuck to it.  Awesome.)

Ahh, lovely. Just like they demonstrated on the video. Simply place the dino pieces together and glue them down with a bit of icing.  The template was supposed to yield three dinosaur body parts- my cake crumbled into about ten.  Doesn't it look great pieced together?

Here's a closeup of the Jurrassic carnage.

One of the materials I forgot to mention gathering was green food coloring. I used about 15 drops to get a really nice green (totally washed out in the picture, but it truly was nice and green in person.) Here is the crumb coating applied. It definately helped, since most of my cake was crumbs...

After an hour in the freezer, I applied another layer of frosting (with the back of a bread knife- BAD idea...) and then decorated liberally with fun candy.  I made some cute eyes with white candy melts and some black sprinkle dots.  Then I made some teeth with the candy melts. It's really hard to see in this picture.

It's really hard to see in this picture, too, but here we are-  a nice close up of Mr. Disaster the Dinosaur.  :)  The ear spikes were Kenna's idea, and by that point, I was in no place to argue.

He really did end up quite cute. Anyone with any baking or decorating skill can do this with ease. Anyone else, good luck.