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Take a bite of this.By Christine Stoddard QuailBellMagazine.com The most popular pastry around these days is no doubt the cupcake. Old news, yawn. (Seen that, eaten that, got the tattoo.) But did you know that in the Middle Ages, people craved a scalier sweet? Meet the dragon cake—the mightiest of baked goods, a sugary treat of claws and jaws and fire-breathing fierceness. When you bit this baby, it literally bit back! Cupcakes are darling, tame, and predictable. Even the novelty of a chocolate bacon or fried Oreo® cupcake has worn off. About the only surprising flavors left are fetal pig and bunny intestines. It's also a fact that at least four in ten struggling actors who have moved to New York City within the past three years have done a stint at a cupcake shoppe. Because cupcakes are so yesterday, it's time to make the old new again. When's the last time you tried dragon meat?
In the Middles Ages, eating dragon meat was like eating chicken—everybody did it, except for the stray Buddhist Monk who lost his way on the Silk Road. The difference between their dragon and our chicken was that theirs was alive. If you didn't want a dragon wing to flutter in your eye, you had better pinch it. If you didn't want a dragon tooth to tear your lip, you had better rip off the little bugger's head first. More than one eater of the dragon cake complained of singed hair and scorched skin, too. If eating a dragon cake was a small adventure, making a dragon cake was a grand one. To make a dragon cake, you first had to capture a dracling, or baby dragon. This meant getting the dracling fresh from the egg. Disturbing a dragon's nest is no easy task. Imagine the fear factor of disturbing a crocodile's nest. Now multiply that by 100. That's how hard and scary it is to snatch eggs from a watchful dragon mama. Assuming you succeeded in your quest, you then had to shove a dracling into each and every cupcake you made. Needless to say, draclings didn't like that kind of subservience very much. For some reason, nobody ever considered killing and cooking a dragon. Surely eating a dead dragon would've been simpler than eating a live one. Of course, this was also the same age where people believed in leeching and chastity belts. It's up to us to resurrect the dragon cake...with one crucial modification. Who wants to design a dracling guillotine? CommentsComments are closed.
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