Wilton Dinosaur Cake Pan, Kids 3D Birthday Cake Pan, Silver, Aluminum

I brushed a "cake release" mixture (equal parts flour, canola oil and butter) onto the pan with a pastry brush. The cake popped right out of the pan and looked perfect. My 9 year old had a blast decorating it.

Very nice mold worked well!

I am not much of a baker and don't really have any cake decorating experience beyond "cover the whole thing in frosting," but I thought I'd try out this pan for my 3-year-old's birthday. He is obsessed with dinosaurs right now. When the cake pan came in the mail he was super excited and wanted me to make it right away. I was concerned about it turning out correctly so I read the directions that came with the pan carefully, plus watched a bunch of videos first. Wilton has some very good directions; I'd recommend looking at their videos on YouTube for pointers. I made the cake using Wilton's butter cake recipe plus a double batch of Wilton's standard vanilla buttercream icing recipe. For the decorations, I bought the items suggested on the pan's directions: frosting tips (#3, #5 and #18), icing bags, and several colors of Wilton's icing dyes. Also super important: based on tips I saw from other bakers, I sprayed the heck out of the pan with their "Bake Easy" spray before putting in the batter. It took quite a bit longer to cook than the recipe said it would, but I wanted to be sure the cake was not raw in the center. I let it cool on a rack overnight and then followed the directions in their online videos for how to get it out of the pan -- it came out flawlessly. I followed the directions on the pan to do the decoration. Not going to lie, the decoration took a long time, and doing all those tiny green frosting stars hurt. But it came out very well and my son was totally "wooooowwww my dino cake!!" about how it turned out. Very happy with the results.

This pan is super cute, very durable and easy to use with a few tips ---1) Do a practice run if you are using it for an important event and use exactly what you used for your practice run! -- I did a practice chocolate cake and it turned out PERFECT!! For the day of the event I switched to vanilla cake - I don't know if it was the vanilla or bad luck, but the day of my cake was a nightmare!! Practice!2) When using boxed cake mix, use about 2 boxes -- I have made this cake 3 times with 3 different versions of cake mix and every time I used 2 boxes each run. Your batter may rise over the pan, but once your cake has cooled just use dental floss to drag over the top and even out the base of the cake.3) For me this cake takes about 90-120 minutes to bake all the way through. I set my oven for an hour and then check with a metal kabob skewer every 10 minutes or so. Even though this cake bakes forever, every single time the cake has been super moist and delicious, so don't stress too much about it drying/burning.4) SPRAY LOTS OF PAM (or any oil spray)!!! For my day-of cake I sprayed Pam, I swear I did! But somehow the cake WOULD NOT come out of the pan! I am going to assume I didn't spray enough, so make sure you do use enough! My day almost ended in tears, but my mom came up with the great idea to leave the cake stuck in the pan and just decorate the darn pan! Keep this in mind in emergency situations, it makes a great story, especially when you make the person of honor cut the "cake" like I did. lol ;)5) When you put the pan in the oven, set it in another pan so that it doesn't tip. --- I'm sure I'm showing what an idiot I am, but once when I was baking this cake I set the pan on the oven rack by itself (you bake it as an upside down car, so the cake pan is NOT level). Suffice to say, within 20 minutes my oven was smoking because the whole pan tipped over and 2 boxes worth of cake mix seeped all throughout my oven. My dad had to take the oven apart (tools and everything!) to clean all the layers down to the coils. This was such a dumb mistake that ruined my night of baking (and smoked up the whole house!).I hope you have as much fun with this cake pan as I have had so far!! Hopefully my tips will eliminate any stress it has the potential to cause!! ;)

This cake pan is nicely made and the cake came out perfectly. It has nice decorating instructions which I definitly used. It was the feature of the birthday party.

This pan is for Mom's 96th birthday party this weekend. Her first grandson will be here to celebrate with us and he was a huge dinosaur fan as a child, so it's fun to be "retro". Family is the greatest blessing EVER and Wilton makes is fun and beautiful with all they. have to offer for decorating and enjoying family gatherings..

Good for my 2y.o. bday

We did not have a big party so I did not need to make a cake so I ended up returning this. It was a very cute pan and probably would have made a very cute cake. If the need arises I will purchase this again.