Ancient Red Dragon Cake

Our love of Dungeons and Dragons continues! For her birthday this year, my niece requested an Ancient Red Dragon, guarding a d20, sitting on rocks that spell out “Roll for initiative.” At this point, I’m becoming something of a dragon specialist (see my Frost Dragon Cake and my Norbert(a) Cake), so this seemed well within my skill set.

The chunks of rock themselves are sea foam candy, carved into the shape of the letters, with strips of red and orange LEDs behind them, hooked up to a basic flicker effects controller.

The sides of the d20 are made of gum paste, precut into triangles and assembled around the cake in the center. It turns out that an icosahedron is a very difficult shape to assemble accurately, so I had to do a little shaving and filling to make everything fit, but I was able to mostly hide the imperfections on the back and underside of the die.

I premade the head out of gum paste, so it would be totally dry when I went to assemble the cake. The wings, the spines on its back, and the little fins around the mouth are made of wafer paper (of course with some wire support inside the wings.)

To make the mouth glow, I ran wires down the underside of the belly to a flame simulation LED under the tongue (which is also made of wafer paper). I really wanted smoke to come out of the mouth, too, so I ran a tube up the underbelly and into the mouth as well and hooked it up to the same dry ice fogger I made for the Frost Dragon Cake. The fog didn’t really come out of the mouth, I think because the tube I used was too narrow, so I unhooked it and just made a dramatic atmospheric cloud of fog around the whole scene.

Frost Dragon Cake

My creative brief for this cake was a frost dragon from Dungeons and Dragons. As far as I was able to discover, there is not actually a canonical frost dragon in D&D, but I found a photo of this figurine and my niece deemed it acceptable so I set about transforming it into cake. 

The interior support structure of the dragon is made of foam core and 1/8” brass rod. The landscape around the dragon is rice krispie treats covered with royal icing, which I applied with an offset spatula then textured with a damp paper towel. The underbelly of the dragon is also made of rice krispie treats, as a result of which I was reminded of a valuable lesson – rice krispie treats don’t stick very well to foam core, at least not well enough to be used upside down, supporting the weight of a layer of fondant. The rice krispie treats began to separate from foam core, resulting in some big cracks on the dragon’s belly. 

Before it got any worse, I added a few more rock formations to support the belly and patched the cracks with royal icing. About 2/3 of the tail is also rice krispie treats and the rest of the tail and body in chocolate cake, covered with fondant. The legs are a 50-50 mix of fondant and gum paste. I did all the scale texture with a highly sophisticated tool that I made by cutting a v-shaped notch into a piece of foam core.

Before I attached the head, a 2-year-old friend who was hanging around our house told me that it looked like a dolphin. She’s not entirely wrong. With the head connected, though, it began to look like a dragon. The head is made of gum paste formed over a mold I made out of foam core. 

The wings are also gum paste, over top of a structure made of wire. The wings were the part I was most nervous about attaching, but they turned out to not be a problem at all. The treasure chest and the coins are also made of gum paste, with royal icing accents on the chest.

Because no dragon is complete without a miasma of ominous fog, I ran a PVC tube under the cake board and up into the treasure chest. I hooked this up to a home-made dry ice fogger, which consisted of a 5-gallon bucket with 3 little fans I had lying around glued into a hole I cut in the side of the bucket and – voila! The fog didn’t last too long, because there was no heating element in the fogger, but it was cool while it lasted.