I was so excited when my brother Kent and his fiancé Evaleigh asked me to make their wedding cake! I had never made anything so complex or grandiose but was looking forward to the challenge! They are both major DnD players and love playing games. They wanted to incorporate this love into their cake. After doing a few searches on “classy geek wedding cakes” they settled on the idea of dragons!

The original design was to have a dragon leaning up the side of the cake with swirls of magic cascading down from their figurines. I loved it and as I started to do my own research on best ways to proceed I found a full tutorial on a gravity defying dragon wedding cake on the sugargeekshow.com! Her tutorial was so easy to follow and I learned a ton! Kent and Evaleigh loved the idea and so we ran with it!

This was my first large scale sculpted project (and my first wedding cake) and I ran into some unexpected challenges. I ended up needing a little more modeling chocolate and so some of the muscles are a little smaller than I planned. My dragon lost his claws as well, poor guy. They kept falling off and in the end, I kind of got frustrated at them and ate them! Probably shouldn’t have done that. I also learned that I definitely under estimated how much time I needed to allocate. I was up basically all night finishing it up. The reception was at my house though so I didn’t have to worry about the delivery, phew!

For the wings, I ordered wafer paper but I received rice paper instead and I didn’t have time to reorder. (Did I mention that they had a short engagement and so from the time I found the tutorial to the reception, it was about 2 and a half weeks!) I rough painted them with white and the rice paper was a happy “mistake”. The wings were a haunting feature that really made the dragon look like an undead ice dragon, which Kent and Evaleigh loved.

For the flavors, they wanted each tier to be a different flavor combination. The bottom tier is an orange sponge cake with blackberry filling and a chai spice buttercream. Tier 2 is a milk chocolate cake with peppermint ganache and chocolate fudge buttercream. The next tier is a classic southern coconut cake with blackberry filling and a vanilla custard crème and the top tier is an almond sponge and vanilla custard crème. I covered the crumb coat layers in a swiss buttercream. I airbrushed the magic swirls with layers of purple, blue and pink.

As a part of the display, Kent wanted to include some gum paste flowers that were used on a birthday cake from our recently deceased grandmother. They were a lovely finishing touch on the table around which we had cupcakes available for anyone that came to the open house before the cake cutting happened.

Baked December 2021