A Chinese New Year Cake

Last week, I volunteered to bring some sort of food to Ashlyn’s Chinese school New Year Gala today. What to bring, what to bring?

I found a winner. Easy peezy. I think the word she used was “foolproof.”

If you want to give it a try yourself and wow your kids, Chinese friends, or simply yourself (I’m thinking I have been my biggest admirer on this one), here’s how to do it:

Find a dragon head online to use. My inspiration used this one. I preferred something a little more elaborate and Chinese looking. So, I used this picture I found online that was a bulletin board decoration a teacher made for Chinese New Year.

Gather ingredients. I may be slightly over ambitious to try this thing. But, I’m not insane. Cake mixes are just fine. And, I used two to make my dragon about 26″ long. My inspiration used M&Ms to cover her cake with scales. But, when I went over to the single color bulk M&Ms and realized I would need to spend over $30 on M&Ms alone, I quickly decided that icing with nonpareil sprinkles and gummy orange slices for spikes would be just fine. I did “splurge” on an impulse buy of rock candy on a stick for his horns for $.99 each. And, I spent a whole $.33 on bright colored gummy tulips to use for feet.

“Foolproof” didn’t start out real well when my first attempt at my bundt cake turned out like this.

Here’s my formal thanks to all my Facebook friends who talked me off the ledge and coached me through how to butter and flour a bundt cake pan. I happened to have another mix in the pantry. So, back to work. And, the next two turned out just perfect.

After your cakes are fully cooled, cut them in half and set them up on the board in S shapes.

Mix up your icing to be whatever color you want. For two canisters of icing, I used a whole container of yellow food coloring with a couple drops of red to make an orange color. Then, start icing the thing. I intentionally made the icing “rough” to look textured. And, I used the icing to glue the cake pieces together a little when I got to the seams.

As you finish up icing a half cake, sprinkle the nonpareils or sprinkles if you are going to use any (I used them only behind the head and around the tail) and go ahead and start to set up your spikes since the icing will harden if you wait to the end and make it hard to get those things to stick. When I was buying these in bulk, I had no idea how many we would need, so I bought 3 lbs of these at $1.50 a lb. Turns out, we only needed 28 total and I have about 3 times that left. Orange slices, anyone?

Use Twinkies or some other Twinkie-like cake (I used butterscotch crumpets with the icing removed since my store was out of Twinkies…how does that happen?) to form a tail. Mark masterfully cut down the end of the cake and shaped the tail for me like a surgeon. And, after generously icing the tail, I used three orange slices sort of fanned out to make the tail look like a dragon tail and not just a snake tail or something.

Done.

I guess it was sort of foolproof once I got the cake out of the pan.

Now, wake your husband who went to bed a few steps ago and Skype your mom and dad at close to midnight and make them oooo and ahhh at your creation.

Now, I just have to get this thing in the car and to the gala. Lord help me.

During breakfast, Mark suggested you could make individual servings of something similar using bagels or frosted donuts. He’s a genius.