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.