Desserts for dinosaurs

So I'm still working on the whole fancy-pants dessert table concept (see anything featured by Amy Atlas) so there's no cutesy backdrop for my sweets. 

The cake and cookies more than make up for the lack of backdrop, however:

The cake is chocolate with buttercream frosting and features a volcano.  A cookie Tyrannosaurus Rex, Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops standing around the "4" candle complete the scene. 

To go along with the cake, I made chocolate-frosted pretzels covered with Dino sprinkles from Karen's Cookies Shop.

I put out a dish of M&M's flanked by dinosaurs.  I tried to use the Little Guy's dinosaurs throughout the house for decorations. 

This Spinosaurus is either really scary as he guards the cookies...or really happy to be so close to the cookies.  I'm not sure which!

Take a look at the cookies, and you can be the judge of his demeanor.

All of the dinosaur cookies were made with cutters from Karen's Cookies.  For anyone looking for specialty cutters that you just can't find in a store, I highly recommend them!  I baked all the cookies (with help from my family, of course!) and the Big Guy and Handy Freddy helped flood the cookies after I outlined them.  The frosting is Karen's meringue powder buttercream recipe, and I've been using it for years. 

The Dino footprint cookie was Handy Freddy's idea.  I had an egg cookie cutter, and I had planned to do speckled dinosaur egg cookies.  Freddy suggested cutting a "M" shape into the wide part of the egg to turn it into a footprint to match the chalk footprints outside the house.  Isn't that brilliant?

For a dramatic presentation of the cake, I put 6 trick sparkler candles into the volcano part of the cake.  Grouping them so close together gave me a huge flame rather than sparks, but since no one was burned and the house didn't catch on fire, I'm declaring it a success.

And that's how we do things for a Dino-riffic 4th birthday party!

Have a great weekend, everyone! And Happy Veterans Day!