Green Dragon Birthday Cake

Green Dragon Cake

My son has just turned six, and decided that he wanted a dragon cake. I have made him one before, which had quite a few mishaps before if finally made it to the party, but I thought, hey, I'll give it another go.
 The cake was a lovely moist chocolate fudge cake, sliced and filled with chocolate buttercream, carved into shape, and then crumb coated with the buttercream before adding the fondant icing.

This is the cake after carving and, I am just moulding the fondant on. I found moulding the fondant around the shape of the cake a little challenging, but after smoothing it with my hand for a while, which warms the fondant for easier covering I was happy with the result.

 I coloured white fondant with dark green and yellow paste colourings to get the acid colour green I was after. Paste colourings are much easier to work with than liquid and as they are very concentrated you only require a small amount to get a good solid colour. Liquid colouring tends to make fondant very soft, so if you need a strong colour for your project, I would always recommend gel paste food colourings.

After I was happy with the shape, and had cut the excess fondant off, I started to add the details. I never really had a clear picture in my head of how I wanted the dragon to look, so it was very much a trial and error process until I decided what I liked.

Finished! After all the moulding had been done, I very liberally dusted pearlescent lustre dust all over him to give him a glow. I popped a small indoor sparkler into his mouth which looked  very effective when lit. And most importantly my son loved it.

Dragon cake

This was for my little ones birthday. I wanted to make a 3D cake, and learnt a lot from the experience, namely don't make the head from cake, as it will fall off!

I cut out all the scales from fondant, but with the amazing gift of hindsight, should have made them much thinner, as I spent about two hours cutting out each individual circle and layering them over each other, only to find later that day they had all slipped down the cake.
This caused me a bit of a problem which is very visible, in that I had to replace the scales, but as the crumb coat underneath was chocolate ganache it now showed on the scales and could not be covered up!

The cake was a chocolate Madeira, with chocolate ganache. The cake itself was very big, and when I tried to move it even more ganache squeezed through the scales, so I thought it was prudent to leave it where it was.

 It didn't seem to matter to the kid's much though, as the party sparklers coming out of it's mouth and nostrils seemed to capture their attention.