Dragon Cake

My oldest son's birthday is next week, and we had his party today.  He wanted the party at Chuck E Cheese, and until about two weeks ago, just wanted a plain chocolate cake from them.  Then he changed his mind and said he wanted a dragon cake.  I did some google searching, and hit the jackpot!  It is the Chinese year of the dragon, and as Chinese New Year was just a little while ago, there were tons of dragon cakes and dragon cake ideas out there.  We fell in love with this one, from a blog of a family who adopted twin girls from China.  I decided to make half the cake chocolate, and half vanilla.  I went to Smitten Kitchen to get my recipes.  One vanilla and one chocolate.

My son wanted a red dragon, but I haven't found a place here yet to buy no-taste red flavoring, and knew that the amount of red dye required to get a really red frosting tastes really bitter otherwise.  I was going to get bulk one-color M&Ms, but then my husband found cherry M&Ms at the grocery store.  Much less expensive!  I really liked the two different shades of red, and the fact that they were not all of a uniform size.  I don't know what I was thinking only getting one bag though!  One bag covered half of one bundt cake, so around 11 p.m. last night, I found myself driving around town to find more.  The CVS where my husband found them the first time was closed, the closest grocery store had only raspberry M&Ms which were more pink than red.  I found them at the third store though, and bought three more bags.

For the dorsal scales, I chose gummy butterflies, and cut them in half.  I bought a dozen of them, and ran out of them for the tail - I should have bought a few more.  They were a bit floppy, but when anchored with M&Ms on each side, held up well.

I made a cream cheese frosting (no recipe, just two blocks of cream cheese, a bit of milk, and powdered sugar to taste), and went for an orange color.  I could not believe how long it took to put all of the candies on!  The fat little rabbit kept waking up too, so there were some breaks in there.  The blog where I found this cake idea used some sort of snack cake to shape the tail.  I just cut down the end of one of the bundt cakes into the shape I wanted.  Half way there!

I used strawberry licorice swirls to make fire from the dragon's mouth, and stuck the head onto the cake with toothpicks.  Finally finished about six hours after I started!  I think it would have taken about 3 hours total, if I'd had all of the candies I needed, and had a baby who'd stay asleep!

It was a hit at the party!