DINOSAUR PARTY FOOD
Fun to make! Fun to eat!
Origins |
Fossils |
Cave Art |
Cave Painting
Dinosaurs |
Dinosaur Party |
Dinosaur Food |
Dinosaur Crafts
Abandon knives and forks in favour of finger-food for a dinosaur party! Encourage the 'meat eaters' to gnaw on chicken legs - make good use of 'French stick' bread - it looks a bit like a dinosaur bone if you add a little imagination! Make sure you include some party favourites though, so that you know your party guests will really enjoy their food. More dinosaur food ideas follow . . .
Oh - and some of our Dinosaur Party Games involve eating food, so you might like to check out those pages too!
WARNING!
Following these dinosaur party food suggestions will not improve your table manners!
DINOSAUR PARTY SANDWICHES
BONE SHAPED SANDWICHES
- Slice some 'finger rolls' or 'french sticks'.
- About 3cm from the end of the roll / stick, cut a diagonal slit in the top layer of bread - starting at one edge and stopping just before the middle. Repeat on the bottom layer, but cutting from the opposite side.
- Splay out the two ends to 'widen' the top of the 'bone' at each side.
- Repeat at the other end of the roll / stick.
- Fill the bread 'bones' with your favourite sandwich fillings. Salad would look good - especially if you leave 'greenery' hanging out untidily, so they look a bit 'wild'.
'CRUNCHY MEAT & BONE' SANDWICHES
- Slice open some pittas, or slice rolls or bread as for open sandwiches.
- Arrange thinly sliced meat on the bread - or inside the pitta with the meat hanging messily over the edges.
- Spatter with a few small splodges of tomato sauce (or a red relish), making sure that some are visible on bits of meat which stick out.
- Break some long breadsticks in half, Stick them into the meat so that the broken ends stick out for a few centimeters around the sandwiches - like broken bones
- At each end of the
DINOSAUR PARTY DESERTS
CHOCOLATE FOSSILS
These are fun to make - they require lots of 'bashing'!
For a variety of effects, use digestives for one batch, ginger biscuits for another, and a mixture of digestives and ginger biscuits for a third batch.
NoteYou need at least one real fossil - and enough time for the chocolate to set hard.
- First, get bashing! Making biscuit crumbs is fun - put your biscuits into a clean carrier bag. Squash out the air and tie up the bag, then "bash them all to bits" with a rolling pin!
- Line a swiss-roll tin with greaseproof paper, without greasing it.
- Make a cheesecake-style biscuit base to receive your fossil impressions:
Melt some butter, stir in the crushed biscuits and tip the mixture onto a swiss-roll tin (lined with greaseproof paper - but you don't need to grease it first). Flatten the mixture firmly - the sides of the tin will allow you to make quite a solid layer. You need enough crumb mixture make a layer about as thick as your finger.
- Now take your clean fossil, press it halfway into the crumbs, then lift it out carefully, so that you are left with a shallow, fossil-shaped depression. Make as many impressions as the size of your plate or tray will allow, but leave at least a finger-width between each one so that they don't collapse.
- Melt chocolate and pour it very gently into each depression
- Leave the chocolate fossils to set in a cool place for a few hours.
- When the chocolate is solid, lift each fossil out of the biscuit base, and use a pastry brush to brush away some of the surplus crumbs. Don't brush all the crumbs away - you need some to make your fossil look 'stony'!
FOSSIL SWAMP
The 'Fossil Swamp' uses the biscuit base from the 'Chocolate Fossils'.
- Either remove the 'Chocolate Fossils' and leave the fossil impressions undisturbed, or leave the 'Chocolate Fossils' in place, and excavate them as you eat the cheesecake.
- Pour either whipped chocolate mousse or whipped cheesecake mixture on top.
- Put the 'Fossil Swamp' in the fridge to set.
Eat with a teaspoon, 'excavating' down to uncover the fossil impressions (or chocolate fossils).
DINOSAUR PARTY BISCUITS
FOSSIL BISCUITS
Using your favourite roll-out biscuit dough recipe:
- Roll out the dough
- Cut out snail-like ammonite shapes (make a cardboard template to cut around if necessary)
- 'Draw' the ammmonite details on to each shape with a skewer or pointy teaspoon handle. Try to keep all your lines very clear, as they will get more 'blurry' during cooking. Fine lines would just disappear.
- Bake the biscuits according to your recipe's instructions.
"ROCK ART" BISCUITS
Using your favourite
pale coloured roll-out biscuit dough recipe so that your colours show up to make colourful biscuits decorated with
cave painting style designs.
- Roll your biscuit dough out flat.
- Pull it apart into irregular shapes - each shape must be large enough to 'draw' on.
- Scratch a cave-art style drawing - of a bison, perhaps - into the surface with a skewer or pointy teaspoon handle. Try to keep all your lines very clear, as they will get more 'blurry' during cooking. Fine lines would just disappear.
- Using a pastry brush and a variety of food colourings, paint half of your biscuits. The uncoloured biscuits will look like 'rock engravings' and the coloured ones will look like 'rock paintings'.
- Bake the biscuits according to your recipe's instructions.
DINOSAUR PARTY CAKES
BIG BOULDER DINOSAUR CAKE
Use your favourite rock cake recipe for this cake. (Rock cakes are a fruit cake mixture cooked in bun tins - you just blob it in and 'rough it up' all over.)
- Bake a very big rock cake (for your big boulder) and several small ones
- Make some fudge icing - but instead of icing the top of the cake, spread it over the cake plate to look like mud.
- Pile up the rock cake 'boulders' on the 'mud' icing.
- 'Stamp' dinosaur footprints into the the 'mud' around the 'boulders' (for example, wrap the end of a pencil in cling-film and press it into the fudge surface to make toes, and use a clean finger-tip to make the main part of the foot).
- Place plastic dinosaurs amongst the 'boulders'.
- Tuck sprigs of parsley 'vegetation' between the rocks, just before serving.
ROCK CAKE SURPRISE
Make ammonite (snail-like) shapes from ready-to-roll icing (as in the
'Dinosaur Excavation Cake' recipe) and put them inside each rock cake before you bake it.
Note:
Fossil hunters use a special hammer to crack open rocks they mink might contain fossils - so you might like to pass around a toy hammer for anyone who wants to bash their cake to bit!
DINOSAUR EXCAVATION CAKE
The
'Dinosaur Excavation Cake' cake needs no cooking (just an hour or two to set).
You need to prepare your 'bones' in advance.
- Use a packet of 'roll out' icing (as if it were plasticine) to model some 'mini dinosaur bones', and leave them in a paper bag at room temperature until they are hard. Make them big enough so that no one will choke on them accidentally.
- Mix a batch or your favourite biscuit cake recipe
- Put a very thin layer of the crumbly mixture into a shallow flan dish (the sides are helpful!)
- Sprinkle the 'dinosaur bones' over the first layer.
- Sprinkle the rest of the biscuit cake mixture over the bones and gently flatten it. (If you press too hard it will be difficult to 'excavate' the bones.)
- Spread a layer of fudge icing or melted chocolate over the biscuit-cake, and leave it somewhere cool to set.
To serve the 'Dinosaur Excavation Cake', give guests a fork and teaspoon to 'excavate' their way down to the 'bones'. Warn them not to eat the 'bones'!
VOLCANO CAKE
Chocolate cake is ideal, but for a quick alternative use shop-bought chocolate swiss rolls (ordinary large ones rather than mini rolls).
- Bake your cake in a conical container, or construct a conical shape by cutting a cake into pieces and stacking them up. If you are using swiss rolls, stand one on its end like a central pillar, and lean pieces of more swiss rolls against it.
-
Hollow out the top of the 'hill' a little, with a spoon.
- Cover the hill sides with fudge icing (this will help to stick it together!)
- Fill the hollow at the top with raspberry jelly, allowing some to dribble down the sides like lava, and plop a few little heaps of jelly on the plate around the cake.
- Drop a few red, yellow and orange fruit gums into the jelly lava to look like 'glowing rocks'
- Stick 'Sparkler' Candles through the jelly into the top of the 'hill'.
