Happy Birthday America

The Fourth of July is the most looked forward to holiday of the summer. Filled with family, friends, grilled out food, drinks, outdoor games, and of course fireworks. I spent my Fourth at my aunts house. She has a beautiful back patio filled with multiple seating areas, heating lamps, tiki torches, plants, and a hot tub. My family was tasked with bringing a dessert to the party and as usual my mom handed that job over to me. Needless to say, I was delighted with the excuse to bake a delicious treat and immediately took to Pinterest to discover some inspiration.

I began with a simple search, “Fourth of July Desserts.” From there I discovered my inspirations for what I eventually created.

None of these designs was exactly what I was looking for, but i did like a few aspects from each. Because of this, I decided to take certain elements and combine them. I ended up making a double layer 9 inch round cake. I colored one layer red and the other blue with food coloring. After baking these two cakes, I allowed them to cool and then wrapped them in plastic and placed them in the freezer overnight.

The next morning, I took the cakes out of the freezer and cut the raised tops of of both of the cakes in order to make them more level and easier to stack. Freezing them overnight makes them easier to work with and allowed me to cut them cleaner. I then took out my handy dandy store-bought buttercream frosting, decided which cake would be my bottom layer, and began to frost the top of that cake. In order to make my vision of a red, white, and blue cake come to life, I decided to make an exposed cake. Meaning I was not going to frost the outside of the cake, only the middle and top layers. I had never done a cake like this before so it was something different for me!

After I finished frosting the middle layer, I placed the second cake on top and began to frost the top of that layer. After I finished frosting the cake, making sure to clean up the sides of it so the red and blue layers were prominently showing, I moved on to my next element: an American flag made up of red, white, and blue M&Ms. The flag took up the entire top of my cake and served as the focal point of my cake. To finish the cake off, I piped the bottom of the cake, the blue layer, with red frosting and the top layer of the cake, the red layer, with blue frosting.

Voilá! I was done.

The cake was a hit at my aunt’s house, everyone loved the exposed detail and appreciated the red and blue layers of the cake. Not only that, but the cake was delicious! Now here is to waiting for my next excuse to go all out decorating a cake or cupcakes for the next family gathering!