American Flag Cake

In honor of Presidents day/week, and alternate side parking being suspended I was inspired to make a celebratory cake.  Around July 4th of last year, everyone was making these amazing looking cakes.  The outside of the cake was simple and white, only to reveal a bright and vibrant American Flag when cut open!  I have been itching to make this cake, but once Independence Day passed, I really lost my opportunity; until now!

I am still impressed that I was able to pull this off!  Here’s what I did:  I greased 3- 9″ round cake pans and 1- 6″ round cake pan.  I mixed up a double batch of yellow cake. Once mixed, I removed 4 cups of batter and colored it blue using royal blue gel food coloring.  I poured the blue batter into a 9″ round cake pan and baked it at 325°F for 45-50 minutes until a toothpick came out clean.  The rest of the batter was colored red using 2 ounces (2 bottles) of red liquid food coloring.  I separated the batter evenly between the 2 remaining 9″ round cake pans and the 6″ round pan and baked them along with the blue cake, until done.

Once the cakes were cool, I sliced the red 9″ cakes into 3 layers each.  You may notice that there are only 5 layers of the large cake instead of the 6 I promised.  I might have gotten lazy and messed up one of the layers.  Bummer.  I’ll be better next time!  But I digress. Getting back to business; I cut a 6″ circle from the center of the blue layer allowing room for the 6″ red cake to fit snugly inside.  Before fitting the 6″ red cake inside the blue cake ring, I sliced it into 3 layers and stacked them with lots of vanilla frosting.

Starting with the large red layers, I stacked and filled the cake with plenty of delicious vanilla frosting.  Once the larger layers were stacked nicely, the red filled blue cake was fitted on top.  Then the whole cake was crumb coated or covered completely with vanilla frosting and put in the fridge to firm up.  I could have left the cake like that, but I was nervous that when I cut it, the cake would be upside down or inside out.  So I decided to decorate the outside of the cake as my backup plan.  I decided I could post the cake nicely decorated and ff the cake looked terrible inside, I just wouldn’t post that part.  Lucky for me, it turned out great!

To make the vertical stripes I used a technique I found on this gorgeous blog named Jessicakes.  Jessica is super talented and has great tutorial!  You can find the tutorial I used here.  I love learning new techniques, thanks for sharing, Jessica!

I hope you enjoy this cake post; my son Charlie sure did-  Happy Presidents Day!