Dinosaur Train - themed birthday cake

Birthdays are big deal.  

And we mothers know it.  In fact we make it a big deal! Whether you celebrate it with an enormous list of guests or you chose to keep the moment intimate, there is still a lot of planning which needs to find some time on your busy and most likely an overfilled calendar on the fridge. 

Cakes naturally take the centre of attention in this play of birthday celebrations. I remember, last year when I had to invest a great deal of time in running around to find the perfect cake. My son was at an age where he had outgrown Barney, well sort of, and he was not into spider-man enough to want a red and blue cake. Dinosaur train, however, was his favourite show at the time. He knew its songs and had its lyrics memorized. So choosing dinosaur train as a theme was an easy answer when it came to deciding on what kind of cake I should get. It sounded great and I was excited. But only until I met the real challenge. To my surprise, I couldn't find a cake with this theme in my area of hunt. 

I remember doing a lot of bakery-hopping. It wasn't until I came across a store that sold a dinosaur train card game. Yes, you read that correct, a card game not a cake. In my point of desperation, this seemed like a huge green light of hope! And of course there is no telling that I grabbed the box from the shelf quicker than I would catch my breath. With the receipt in my hand and dinosaur card game in my bag, I still had to figure out how I will turn this card game into a cake. Anyway, the adventure was undertaken and the tough got going. 

Since I had spent all my allotted time hunting for dinosaur-themed items, I actually didn't have much time for baking. And hence felt justified in cheating myself to an already baked cake from the bakery nearby. I bought the simplest kind I could get - although those are hard to find these days.  Once I took all the frills out I mixed in my blue and green icing on the cake and stuck the dinosaur pop-up cards from the card box game and bordered the cake with them. And Viola! a dinosaur-themed cake was before my eyes. My son was delighted! Needless to say his delight was priceless for me.