Ever Popular Flag Cake!

Yes, I am attempting the Flag Cake.  To gear up my confidence for this endeavor, my daughter had me look at this blog and this one also, and tried to talk me out of this.  I don’t decorate cakes, so she couldn’t understand the pull I had toward this cake!  I needed to make it!

Here is how it went… first borrow more round cake pans—I ended up with 6—if I do this again, I’ll just go for the whole 8.  Then I looked at the recipe—many of you would look at the recipe first, but this is how I get myself into this.  It called for 9 egg whites!  I’m not going to waste 9 eggs on a possible failure, so onto 2 cake mixes instead… Prepare your pans—spray them, put waxed paper in the bottom, and spray again!!

Then, separate out 2 cups of batter for blue.  I used almost 1 whole bottle of Wilton Paste food coloring to get this blue. 

I love their blue—my kids’ high school mascot was a blue jay, so I always have blue on hand.  If you use a lot of blue icing, you know that everyone eating the cookies will have blue teeth when they are done.  We’ll see about this cake.  After coloring the blue, I was supposed to stir in white sprinkles, but forgot, so I just shook them all over the top.  They do not fall into the middle of the cake, so if you forget the sprinkles, just leave them out.  Put the blue into the pan and start it baking. 

 

Then color the rest of the cake mix red.  This took one and a smidge more of the Wilton red.  A hint for getting good reds, is to color it and let it set a bit and let the color come on—it will deepen a bit.  I measured out the red by half cups into the rest of my pans and 2 bowls—so 7 red stripes in all. You have to spread out the batter—and make it smooth—the batter won’t spread and smooth itself!  That would have been good to know!

 Notice the paint cans in the background?  Yep, we're also re-doing the bathroom....

And making pickles out of the garden cukes!  Getting back to the cake...

All of my cakes came out easily and I baked them in batches of 3 and 4—the blue one takes twice as long.  I just have a normal oven and they baked just fine, except for being kind of lumpy.  Oh well, that’s what icing is for!

When completely cool, start to raise the layers… putting a good amount of icing between the layers.  I always use a cream cheese icing that I got off Paula Deen.   

When you get to the blue layer, I used a bowl to cut around it and the 3 last red layers.  Then the blue is the donut around the red center.  My blue only let 2 red layers in, so my flag only has 6 red stripes!  But I got to eat the other red layer.  Put the cake in the fridge until the icing is completely set before you ice the outside!!

 

When it’s all solid, you can bring it out and finish the icing. 

Then I decorated the top by whipping out my red, white and blue candy melt lump that I made years ago.  I only use it for the 4^th of July, so the rest of the year I stick it in my fridge.  I try to be all that by using my potato peeler to try to make curls, but that never works, but I use whatever you call these things to decorate the top.

                                                  Now for the slice pic……

YIPPEE!!   SUCCESS!!

 And yes, the blue turned my teeth blue!