Dinosaur Cupcakes

Happy Valentine's Day! I have been planning what I was going to do for LB for a couple weeks now, which was make a cupcake dinosaur. Without knowing this, LB decided we HAD to make cupcakes a while ago and we were able to try out Betty Crocker's Milk Chocolate cake mix and decided that was a good one for cupcakes because it was lighter than our normal cake mix we get, Triple Chunk Chocolate (ugh, that's really LB's love, not mine).

Anyway, I sent LB off to our neighbor, Cody's, apartment (who has been in on both our Valentine's day gifts the whole time) while I did the baking! Obviously, I started out with just making the cake mix as normal, but I was pretty nervous about the oven temperature. Normal cupcakes call for 350 degrees, but it was kind of ambiguous for various baking pan materials, so I lowered it to 325, which had to be lowered even more because our oven is a little hotter than it should be. This picture is seriously like, 5 minutes after I put it in the oven, I had to fill the things up to pretty full so that they would fill up completely and then I could trim off the bottom so that it'd lay flat. I had a fair amount of scraps so that's what I presented to LB when he first came in to see his special surprise! Of course, he then got to see the little beauty you can see at the very top!

Surprisingly, LB's surprise for me were shrinky-dink stegosaurus earrings that he apparently has been working on for weeks! LB works at a craft store so he has easy access to shrinky-dinks. Meanwhile Cody was snickering at how both of our Valentine's Day gifts were dino-themed! We actually still haven't even had the dino-cakes because we went out to dinner and are soooo full, we'll probably hold off and have them as a midnight snack. No clean up picture for tonight! I cleaned up as much as I could tonight as I was baking, but I still have one huge bowl of cake batter, one bowl of blue icing, and one blue of green icing.

By the way! I'm thinking of suing Deco-Cake! I was all excited for the lime green frosting I was going to color, and I got the green out and the yellow out. When I dropped the green dye in, I thought it looked suspiciously red, but I figured it might be like hair dye, where it develops it color once you mix it in. NOPE! All of the labels were WRONG except yellow, the most harmless color. Awesome. Luckily I improvised and made what should have been lime green into sky blue, and made the belly lime green on my second try.

Meanwhile, this is what the cats, HD and RC decided to do all day. What cuties, huh?