Next week is my sons fifth birthday and we’ve decided to have a themed party for him so I needed a dinosaur cake pan. My first thought was to just order a custom made cake in the shape of a brontosaurus, but I really like cooking and baking in my own kitchen so I thought it would be a great idea to make the cake myself. Now I just wonder if I should make two cakes instead of one?
Anyway, I started to do a little research online and quickly realized that you can find pans in just about any shape you want fairly inexpensively. The pans are usually made out of aluminum or tin and will ship straight to your house usually cheaper than it costs to order your own cake. You can expect to pay between nine dollars and twenty dollars depending on the size and elaborateness of the pan itself.
There are a number of companies that make great dinosaur cake pans, including:
- Wilton
- SCI Scandicrafts
- CK Products
- Nordic Ware
- CakeWorks
You can find all of these easily by doing a search at Amazon, or any other online retailer. That last one, CakeWorks, specializes in cool edible decorations to put on the cake itself. You know the type, edible dinosaurs and trees and other things to spruce up the cake itself. Of course, these are more important if you’re making a traditional size cake and adding dinosaur decorations to it.
A friend of mine recommended the Pantastic plastic cake pan by CK Products, but I’m not sure it’s big enough for what I’m looking for. Plus, it’s plastic which just seems a little weird to me. Most people may not care, but I want it to last as long as possible.
And really, who doesn’t love decorating their own cake? Adding frosting and icing that’s just the right color and creating dinosaurs that are just the right shape. Sure many boys might like a car or ship cake for their birthdays, but my little guy wanted a dinosaur and that’s what he’s going to get, I’m sure he’ll love it. I may even let him help me decorate it! But that would probably ruin the surprise, so I’d better not!
At first I thought that I might have to buy a special cake mix for the pan but actually you can use any mix at all. That means I can run to the store and buy a cheap one or two dollar cake mix and that really helps bring down the price of the pan itself. In the end, making the cake myself – even with the expense of the pan and icing – is going to be a lot cheaper than buying a ready-made cake.
In the end, I’m not sure that I’ll use my dinosaur cake pan more than one time but if I do, at least I’ll have it ready. And besides I’m sure my friends will probably borrow it over the years, so in my mind it’s a pretty good investment. Plus its just so much fun!
