Feast of St. George

Monday, April 23 was the feast of St. George (wow, can you believe I'm actually posting about it less than a week later??).  I decided last-minute that we'd make our school day center around this theme... baking a cake for math, reading/retelling a picture book about St. George and the Dragon, and coloring a St. George stained glass window picture.  While the cake cooled, we also threw in some science/nature reading to round out the day. :)

So, if you've seen any other dragon cakes out there in the blogging world, it appears the original idea was from a Family Fun magazine, and it's been shared by Catholic bloggers for this feast day or several years now.  Above, you can see how I cut and assembled the two round layers of cake.  It was a whole wheat devil's food cake recipe... because I had all the ingredients on hand for it, and because in the legend of St. George, the dragon is a symbol of the devil/sin.  Anyway, I didn't cut it quite like the other examples I've seen... for one, the idea of using Ding Dongs for the feet and snout didn't appeal to me (not only did I not want to have to go to the store, I didn't want those in my house because I'd probably eat all the extras myself).  Also, I didn't want a long neck on my dragon cake.  I know dragons typically have long necks, but I just like the look of this better... my dragon basically has no neck, and so I used the would-be-neck cake to make the legs and snout.

We frosted him with icing (2 sticks of butter in that, y'all.  Paula Deen would approve.) tinted a pale green... can we all agree that while much healthier, natural food coloring stinks at producing, well, color?  I ran it out, too, so this is as green as I could get it!  He has white chocolate chip claws, upside-down Hershey Kisses with red M & Ms for eyes, and Hershey Kiss spikes (along w/ two chocolate hip spikes at the end of the tail).  His nostrils are brown M & Ms and his tongue is raspberry fruit leather.

This was actually much easier to put together than I thought it would be... still, I could never have done it in addition to a "regular" school day.  

And here is how I was able to get it assembled/frosted... Caroline provided baby entertainment.  She's not yet crawling, so still not quite ready to do much self-entertainment (ie, pull books off shelves, tear up and eat magazines, eat crumbs and lint off the floor...).

Here the girls slay the dragon with cocktail toothpick swords...

And he just looked so friendly that it was a shame to have to slay him, but mmmmm, he was tasty!  Two sticks of butter, remember?  And that was just in the frosting!