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Updated on April 30, 2020 by · This post may contain affiliate links ·

Dragon Castle Cake

Skill level: Intermediate

Birthday cakes are one of my favorite things to make and this castle cake with a dragon cake topper is the perfect sort of cake to make for the little king or queen's birthday.

Learn how to make a dragon cake topper with posable wings, isomalt dragon fire, all the little details on the castle, how to hand-letter fancy monograms and more!

1:04:39 Minutes of Instruction

What You Will Learn

  • Learn how to create a stylized dragon cake topper with posable wings
  • How to make isomalt dragon fire
  • Learn how to make hand-lettered castle flags and banners
  • How to cover a large double barrel cake
  • Liz Marek's simple technique to make realistic stone texture

Tutorial Chapters

  1. Making the dragon armature 0:10
  2. Building up dragon 4:55
  3. Adding teeth to jaws 7:45
  4. Painting the dragon wings 9:07
  5. Prepping the cakes 14:53
  6. Stacking double barrel 17:01
  7. Making dragon fire 19:50
  8. Adding jaws to dragon head 21:05
  9. Roughing out the dragon head 23:07
  10. Roughing out the body 23:45
  11. Making dragon legs 24:27
  12. Adding texture to dragon 27:30
  13. Adding dragon horns 28:15
  14. Attaching wings to body 29:03
  15. Making dragon spines 31:22
  16. Covering cake board 32:50
  17. Coloring castle brick 34:27
  18. Paneling the double barrel 37:28
  19. Paneling the towers 41:57
  20. Making the front gate 46:35
  21. Adding turrets 47:54
  22. Finishing the front gate 51:03
  23. Making flags 55:00
  24. Airbrushing 59:09
  25. Finishing fire 1:00:24

Sculpted Dragon Castle Cake Tutorial

Fly you fools! I made this cake for my friend's son's birthday and he absolutely loved it. The isomalt fire adds a level of detail that really makes the dragon pop off the cake without too much difficulty. I know many cakers are scared of working with isomalt, but this technique is a good entry point.

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About Liz Marek

Liz Marek is a professional cake artist and recipe developer who has been teaching baking and cake decorating since 2008. She founded Artisan Cake Company in Portland, Oregon in 2009 and now runs Sugar Geek Show, where she publishes kitchen-tested recipes, food science explanations, and step-by-step tutorials.

Liz is best known for sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes. She won Netflix's Is It Cake? Holiday 2 in 2025 with a hyperrealistic Santa cake, and has competed on and won Food Network cake competitions. Cake Masters Magazine named her one of the top 10 cake artists in 2017. She is the author of Artisan Cake Company's Visual Guide to Cake Decorating and a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute.

Her focus is on explaining not just how a recipe works but why it works, so bakers can troubleshoot instead of guess. Every recipe on this site is tested before it's published.

Liz teaches full-length cake tutorials, including sculpted and hyperrealistic cakes, at Sugar Geek University.