Cake help please! Novice baker doing my annual cake bake for ds birthday

[jobnockey]

My annual challenge is to create ds's birthday cake, I don't bake a lot other than cookies and fairy cakes. He wants a 'dinosaur volcano' - great, easy!!!! Have looked a few up and plan on doing a big square cake with a separate pudding bowl shaped cake on top for volcano... Red jelly for lava, what do you think? Any other ideas?

What I mainly need is a recipe for a large (25cm x 25cm x 7cm) square tin, pref chocolate cake. Would it need to be as a sandwich type cake at this size or not? Also a recipe for a pudding bowl sized cake if anyone knows what I mean!!!

If anyone can help I'll be extremely grateful! Am also open to Any ideas or inspiration on design. Thanks in advance mn cake bakers!

This is quite helpful for working out cake sizes and quantities needed:
www.thepinkwhisk.co.uk/2012/06/how-to-scale-up-a-cake-recipe.html

Your cake sounds great by the way. Good luck!

It sounds great and it won't be that hard I do t think. Remember it hardly matters what the cake tastes like! Buttercream icing is your friend as it hides mistakes and it's east to 'sculpt'.

You can colour coconut by just stirring in a couple of drops of food colouring. It makes fantastic grass.

Thank you for replies, hopefully have recipe for big cake sorted, not sure about the volcano one yet but sure I'll work it out.
Coconut grass is a great idea!

I made a volcano cake a few years ago using Nigellas old fashioned chocolate cake recipe, I cooked it in 2 different pyrex bowls, covered in in chocolate buttercream and then crushed chocolate cookies to make it look like rock. I melted orange chocolate drops I had and also tinted some icing red and ran these down the side. I then decorated all around the bottom with crushed cookies, grass like savoy said, plastic dinosaurs etc, and carved a bit out of the top and put a sparkling fountain thing in the top! I've attached a photo to give you an idea, hope it works!

Actually hope this works as it has more red icing on it!

Electryone, that's amazing! Can I quiz you a bit, as that is very much what I'm aiming for...
Is it 2 cakes on top of one another? What shape was the bottom cake? Also, how did you get the icing so red? I can only achieve pink using red food colouring and white icing?...
I have a sparkler thing for the volcano, and was going to write ds's name in those chocolate pebbles somewhere...

Thank you, was so glad it worked out! Yes its 2 cakes, cant remember the exact sizes but I used 2 pyrex bowls, a large ish one, 1 litre I think and a slightly smaller one. I cut out baking paper for the round bit at the bottom and greased the sides and dusted them in cocoa powder. The main thing is to cook at a low temperature for a longer period of time.

This was my original post about it here and I received great help for it!

I put the bigger cake on the cake board and the smaller one on top but I also cut them in half first and put some buttercream icing between the layers to break up the cake. I put buttercream all over the cake board and the green coconut and crumbed biscuits on top of that, the wee dinosaur nest is made with chocolate rice crispies and mini eggs. I use food colouring pastes in all my cake decorating, they are much more intense than the liquids you get in the supermarkets and you just add a small bit at a time until you get the colour intensity you want.

Good luck!

The orange chocolate was the orange chocolate drops you can get in the cake decorating aisle of some supermarkets.

Oh 1 more thing, I also used red sparkly sugar decorations on the icing to! Hope this helps!

Electryone - you're a star!!! I am going to make the main cake tonight so i can freeze it... I will be back with more questions no doubt!