my dragon cake

From the moment that I read M3's blog post about making a dragon cake for her girls' birthday party, I knew that I had to make one. I'm not a cake boss. I don't even own a bundt cake pan. My idea of making dinner it to stick something from the freezer into the microwave and cut up some fresh fruit. But... I knew that it was inside of me. I could make a dragon cake and bring it to a Chinese New Year party where there would be lots of people eat it so I wouldn't have it at home looking at me... tempting me with it's calories. My big hang up about the cake was the dollar amount and time invested in putting on all of those M&Ms. Then I read this blog post by Kelly the Overthinker with her "rough icing" and knew I could create a good looking dragon cake without all of the M&Ms. Kelly also has a link to this awesome dragon face. I printed it out on photo paper so it is thick enough to stand up. I cut a piece of cake at an angle creating a wedge for the dragon face to be propped up against. Some icing makes the photo paper stick to the cake wedge.


Hardest thing about this cake was finding a board to place it on. Then... it came to me. I could wrap a leaf from my kitchen table in red plastic table cloth! I decided to make three white bundt cakes, as I couldn't decide if two or three cakes would fit best of my board. My cakes fell right out of the pans thanks to some baking spray with flour in it. I ended up using two and a half bundt pan cakes, three Twinkies to taper the tail, four tubs of icing, one container of Wilton lemon yellow icing color (found at Walmart), a spash of red icing color gel to warm up the yellow tint to a more golden yellow, one package of Kroger brand fruit slices, and a couple of pieces of cherry pull and peel Twizzlers. I really like the look of the red Twizzlers rope down the side of the dragon for more color pop, and I'm glad that I chose multi color fruit slices.


It took more time to bake three bundt cakes and let them cool than it did to put the icing and decorations on the cake. I made the cakes the night before, sealed them up in zip lock bags, and decorated the dragon the following morning. I sliced the cakes in half with a bread knife and tapered the tail cutting the Tinkies at an angle. I would have liked to have made the dragon red, but I didn't dare try to create deep red cake icing. Red is supposed to be hard to get just right, and I didn't want to end up with a pink dragon.


I'm looking forward to taking the cake with us to a party tonight with several area Taiwanese and Chinese adoptive families! We're blessed with such good kids, and they're stinkin' cute as well.


What does Hannah like best about the dragon cake? Left over icing, of course.



Post script: Remember that NEXT year is the year of the snake, and one could easily make a snake cake using a couple of bundt pans.