Fire-Breathing Dragon Cake
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Fire-Breathing Dragon Cake |
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By Laura Lamond |
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Dragon  I made this with a vegan chocolate cake. If you choose this recipe, be sure to use regular, not Dutch process cocoa (that's why there are some critical reviews at that website). Any very moist cake that can be "moulded" a bit by hand as I did with this one, or cake with a dense crumb (frozen) so that it can be carved will work. I also used organic rice cereal to make vegan marshmallow "squares" (or Rice Crispie squares) that I moulded to form the head and tail.  I used these as they added some structural strength to the cake. They also allowed me to form the head around the straws that were used for the fire-breathing effect.To form the head, I used 2 "bendy straws", forming the head shape around them so that about 3 cm of straw extended beyond the bottom of the neck (and eventually through the cakeboard, see below).  The other ends extended about 1/2 cm out the front of the face to form "nostrils". Pipe a little icing or make a snake of candy clay around each to complete the effect. The plastic wrap helped keep the mixture from sticking to my hands as I moulded it.
 The front of the cake was reinforced with wafer cookies covered in yellow fruit roll-up. This was an "emergency measure" as the rice cereal section did not set as well as I'd hoped. The teeth were made with candy clay, although they can also be made with white chocolate. The mouth was made from red fruit roll-up. Candy clay or fondant icing could also be rolled out and used instead of the fruit roll-ups. The eyes were made from candy clay, as were the scales and spikes. For the scales, I used chocolate candy clay to make them darker and less sweet. To make the scales, I rolled out the candy clay and cut the scales out using a water bottle cap.  A *very thin* coating of buttercream icing or heated jam helps the scales stick to the cake.Perhaps the coolest feature of this cake was its ability to "breathe fire". I made the cakeboard by having the kids colour "grass" pictures, then glued them to a sheet of cardboard. I glued a second sheet of cardboard to the bottom with the corrugations running perpendicular to the first sheet to add strength. I covered the top and sides with Mactac. Then I duct-taped four small yogurt containers to the bottom corners to raise it up. Beneath the head of the dragon I cut the side out of another yogurt container from which I could slide a smaller (applesauce) container in and out. This was the dry ice chamber. Once the head was formed, I lined up the straws on the cakeboard and punched small holes through the board, then inserted the straws. The rest of the cake was formed from this point onwards. There were wings for this cake that didn't make it into the pictures. These were made by wrapping red fruit roll-ups around bendy-straws, leaving about 3 cm at the bottom of the straw to insert into the cake. I made "finger bones" in the wings by pinching the fruit roll-up together from the bent point of the straw downwards, in a sense, "webbing" the wings. This made them look a bit like bat wings. |