Dragon Cake Tutorial

I was looking at the first tutorial I posted over at Catholic Cuisine a few years ago and realized that I don't cut my dragon cakes the same way anymore.  I think those first instructions came from an out-of-print party planning book I used to own. When you make the decision to not use cake pieces for the spikes and use candy pieces or cookies, it frees up some extra cake to use to make the head stand up more rather than just lay flat. I kind of prefer that look to the flat head version over at at Family Fun.

Here is an updated example of how I cut my cakes now (although, every year it's a little different). The first round is always cut in half to form the back. That hasn't changed. The second round gets cut like this:

The bottom two pieces are stuck together to make the head. The longer, pointy-ended piece on top is the tail and the other piece can be shaped for the neck. The next step is assembling and frosting which you can read more about on my post called Frosting the Dragon.