Birthday Dinosaur

We celebrated my youngest's third birthday this weekend. More than anything, he wanted a blue stegosaurus cake. I enjoy a cake challenge (I really do), so I spent a good couple of weeks thinking about it and was really anxious to make it a reality.
I didn't take any photos of the process, mostly because I had food coloring and frosting all over my fingers, but I can describe the process for anyone who might want to recreate it.
Here goes...
The body:
~I started with three round 9" cakes and one 8" square.
~I cut off about 1/3 of each of two round cakes for the body, and stuck them together with a lot of frosting.
~The third round cake I cut out the tail (sort of a J shape, that I then had to tweak when I put the whole thing together).
~Out of the left-overs of that third round, I cut the head - sort of half an oval that was two cake-widths wide.
~I cut the 8" square into 4 equal pieces and then cut one leg out of each quarter.
~There were some left-over chunks, and so I used those to add shape to the head and a couple of triangles to connect the flat tail piece to the hump of the body.
~Then after I put the whole thing together, I frosted the heck out of it.

The spikes:
~I created the shape of one of the spine on a piece of paper. Then I laid it under a large piece of wax paper on the counter.
~I purchased a bag of candy melts at the craft store (in a dark blue color).
~I melted them in a pyrex bowl in the microwave and then poured the contents into a squeeze bottle.
~I traced the shape of the spines and then also filled them in with the melted candy. Moved the paper and traced over again. Repeated a bunch of times. Then I made a few smaller spines.
~I stuck two toothpicks in each of the big spines lollipop-style, so I could easily connect them to the cake later.
~I was having so much fun making stuff with the melted candy in a squeeze bottle that I made a bunch of embellishments that I wasn't sure what I was going to do with.
~After everything dried, I took a knife and trimmed all the spines so they were nice and sharp.

After I frosted the cake, I added all of the spikes and threw on some embellishments. Then, because where the cake meets the plate/cookie sheet/whatever always looks messy, I added some "grass" and "dirt" with the leftover frosting.
This might be my favorite kid-cake that I've ever made. I was really sad when we cut into it. Here is my masterpiece!

The birthday boy loved his cake!
We also had stegosaurus fruit salad. It was a fun party theme!