Using the ingredients list above, combine sugar and butter, then beat in the eggs and vanilla. Mix flour and baking powder together, and then combine the dry ingredients with the sugar-butter-egg mixture. Use the milk to thin out the batter. Cream the butter, sugar, and eggs together really well before adding dry ingredients to your batter.
Use room-temperature butter and whip the ingredients together so the buttercream is smooth, light, and fluffy.
Remove the cake from the sheet tray and allow it to cool on a kitchen towel.
Before you actually cut the cake, you can arrange the paper pieces to see how they look. If there are any cuts or adjustments you’d like to make, you can plan ahead now.
Put the head on the body with some toothpicks (take note of where they are so that you don’t accidentally include them in a slice of cake later). Trim the corners and square edges off the feet and shoulders if you like, but the corners will not be a problem once you frost the cake.
Make palm trees with pirouette cookies for the trunk and pieces of parsley for the palms so it looks like your dinosaur is in a forest. If you have them, you can use plastic dinosaur toys for fun.
