Dragon Cake

I’ve made a lot of kids’ birthday cakes through the years. But this one was … special.

With three sons and two nieces, I’ve made a lot of birthday cakes through the years. Teddy bears, Winnie the Pooh, Barbie cakes, Mermaid cakes, a Batmobile, even an X-wing fighter! I’m not professional, but a long shot. But generally I can put together a competent cake.

Generally being the key word here.

So, with grandbaby turning two this year and having missed celebrating with them last year, I jumped on the chance to make this year’s birthday cake. Lovely spring weather meant that we could gather outside and celebrate both Easter and his birthday in the back yard.

In my excitement ,I offered to make a dragon cake. I mean, I’m getting ready to launch a new dragon book, so a dragon cake makes all the sense in the world right?

Sort of. Almost.

To explain. I baked the cakes and everything went right. They came out of the pans beautifully, baked well, and smelled fantastic. All was right with the world.

After they cooled, I got out my pattern, cut the cakes, and built the shapes. Again, all is well. Up to this stage, I couldn’t have asked for better.

Then I made the icing.

In a fit of insanity, I decided to use an ermine icing, which was the original accompaniment for red velvet cake, the foundation of the dragon. It seemed like a good idea.

Key word here, seemed.

I found a recipe that described the icing as ‘pipeable’, soft, and fluffy, not too sweet, good enough to just eat with a spoon. What was not to love?

Turns out, a lot.

Apparently, sometime in recent history ‘pipeable’ came to mean ‘so soft it runs out of the piping bag and falls off the cake.’ And I mean literally here, falls off the cake. I tried to pipe the eyes and they honest to goodness slipped right off the face!

Plan ‘A’ had been to pipe scales on the dragon with a piping tip. No go. Every tip I tried just kind of sloughed into a puddle of vaguely shaped goo that would not adhere to the vertical sides. So I had to turn to Plan ‘B’ and just ice the sides. The icing mostly stuck, but it was too soft to get a nice smooth finish. It was also too soft to properly adhere slabs of cake together, so nothing was properly anchored together.

At this point, you might ask, why I didn’t give up and make buttercream? Truth be told, I should have done just that. I probably had enough shortening and powdered sugar on hand for it. But I was out of butter and buttercream made out of shortening just doesn’t eat well. And I was short on time since there wasn’t sufficient fridge space to make the cake the night before. So I soldiered on.

There was just enough icing to get a coat on the dragon, but nothing more. So I pulled out a tube of black icing I’d bought just in case. The entire reason I bought it was that the end of the tube was supposed to screw into a standard icing tip coupler so you could skip the piping bag. Great idea!

And a complete and utter LIE!

So the black icing I was expecting to be able to detail the cake with ended up squeezing out all over my hands! Barely any made it on the cake.

At this point, I was getting pretty frazzled. Middle son who had arrived early for Easter lunch laughed and said just lean into the absurd, mom. Just flow with it.

What else was there to do?

So we rooted around the pantry for anything to make the cake presentable. Marshmallows, orange slices, cherry sours, and Reese’s eggs to the rescue.

Introducing: Candy, the ball hoarding nana-dragon. (Never underestimate the power of good marketing!)

My friends, this was not at all what I’d planned to do, but we were able to celebrate together, my two year old grandson had a birthday cake, and he was happy. It tasted good, and the icing really was tasty. So, all in all, I have to call that a success, though not quite the way I’d planned!