We caught a dragon!

Okay so maybe the title isn’t completely true, but I got your attention :-)

For my son’s 6th birthday, my wife got the idea to create a dragon cake for kindergarten. Because this has received so much positive feedback, as well as questions about how we did it, I decided to publish our secret here.

Having the idea itself is creative work, and full credit goes to my wife. Figuring out how to build it was relatively straightforward. Actually building it was a bit of work, but not really difficult.

Here’s how:

The cake itself can be whatever you prefer. We went with a simple light cake and added colored sugar sprinkles that would become visible when cutting the cake. That adds some fun on the inside.

The shape: Dragons are typically snake-shaped, with legs somewhere along the sides. So my wife thought of using a torus cake mold, then cutting the cake in half to combine into an S-shape. Two of these combined into a long snake, because there are around 20 kids in the class:

Happiest dragon I’ve ever seen

If you don’t have a great torus form, you can use a straight form (bread loaf) instead. A straight shape might work better if you choose a different creature, though.

The topping is made of powdered sugar and a little water, plus some food coloring. It took a while to match the color with the graphics I had prepared, but the result was perfect. Also, Smarties! Kids love that.

The graphics are my department. I googled for “cartoon dragon” and filtered to only see green results. I chose an image and copied it into an editor. I worked on the head first: I copied the head and neck into a new file and cleaned up the image a little. Then I mirrored it and placed the two heads nose-to-nose. I printed this double image on card stock and folded it along the mirror axis, then glued it together and put it under a book so it would not bend while drying. That makes for a reasonably sturdy shape, two-sided and perfectly aligned. With sharp scissors, I cut out the shape with a pointy end at the base to be inserted into the cake.

I repeated this for the tail and the legs. I don’t have copyright on the image I used so I will not post a printable template. But now you know my secret, and you can repeat it with whatever creature you like.

To summarize, here’s the “recipe” in pictures:

This was so well received that my wife made another one, but smaller:

Baby dragon (half size)

It’s really not a lot of work. Perhaps we should start taking orders!