Dragon Cake

So we finally got around to having a birthday party for Tyler. You know live is crazy when it is 2 months after a kids birthday before you get around to having the party. I'll post more about his party on my blog, but I wanted to share his cake here. He wanted a How to Train Your Dragon party, so of course that meant a dragon cake.  I found a couple of online tutorials, but they wouldn't let me print them, and/or the pictures wouldn't enlarge so that I could see the cutting pattern very well. So after reading them, and looking at the pictures of a lot of dragon cakes, this is what I came up with. I should have taken assembly pictures but I really didn't know if it was going to work out until I was done and I got a later start on it than I wanted to so I was more focused on making it look like a dragon before the party guests showed up. That and the assembly process really wasn't pretty - there was a lot of frosting to fill in, some triming and adding chunks of cake to make him look more dragon-like.  And I really wasn't sure about the color of frosting - Tyler wanted red - and he and Kaylee mixed it up but it is really hard to get red and not pink so we added some brown and black and ended up with a bizzare pink/purple color, but as it dried it darkened to a creepy dragonish color so it was all good. 

And here he is all aflame...

I used 2 round cakes, a couple of large cupcakes, a couple of little cupcakes, yogurt covered pretzel circles (for the claws), a giant vanilla tootsie roll (found it at the dollar store - to form teeth and the flames - which I tinted with orange and red food color), chocolate covered graham craker cookies (for the spines - I think they were from Kebler) and some coconut tinted green so he could lay in some "grass". Oh and a couple of giant googly eyes (they weren't edible - but they looked way better than anything we could have frosted on.)