Attainable Eats: Easy Fourth of July Cake

The next installment in my Attainable Eats series is a gorgeous but easy Fourth of July cake for y’all.  <- like how I slipped that in there? Nice eh?  How’s that for a colloquialisms mash-up?

How could I leave out my amazing readers south of the border? While whipping up my Simple Canada Day Cake, I also baked up enough cakes to make sure I could create a, easy Fourth of July Cake as well. The beauty to a baking spree with cakes is that they improve after being frozen. I always freeze my cakes. When you wrap them up tightly in plastic wrap – air will make them stale so make sure they are sealed!- and freeze them for a day or two, they are moister by the time you put your cake together.

This cake did take a little more engineering to get the design working, however you can now benefit from my experimenting. Using three colors made it harder to evenly space them out, but after about 3 attempts, I nailed it.

Items Needed:

2 white cake mixes
2 batches of my Best Buttercream Icing

Supplies Needed:

 3 icing tips, Wilton size 18 or 17
3 icing bags
Wilton No Taste Red Icing Gel
Wilton Royal Blue Icing Gel
(2) 9″ cake pans

Bake up your cakes according to the instructions. Bake one cake mix plain white. With the other, divide the batter and color one red and one blue. The shade is up to you!

Once they are baked, freeze them.

When your 4 cakes are frozen, whip up a batch of my buttercream icing. Take the frozen cakes and stack them together in alternating colors, with a little layer of icing between each cake, to hold them together.

When they are frozen, you can trim the edges beautifully with a serrated knife, so you have a nice straight matching side to ice. The sides don’t even have to be perfect, but this works wonders to shape your cake nicely.

Put a crumb coating on and freeze again, to get the icing cold.

Now the decorating.

Ok, Let me ‘splain.

No, there is too much.

Let me sum up.

(Name that movie!)

Around the top border alternate your red, white and blue colored stars. Like below.

Once you have that done, here comes the slightly tricky part.

You need to alternate the colors.

Red will always be under the blue star, like below. Then follow the pattern and white will always be under the red star. Blue star is always under the white.

So below, I started with the red under the blue, all the way around.

Next, beside the single red star on the second line, pipe a white star. This white star is under the top red. Pipe that all the way around, beside the solo red stars.

Next you will have a space left for the blue star. Beside the second level of now two stars (red and white) pipe the blue to fill in the space.

You will now have 2 lines of stars.

Start again on the third row and pipe a single red under the blue stars. Repeat above.

Clear as mud?

This is the pattern that will emerge. Remember with my buttercream that the heat of your hands will soften it, take a break, put the icing bag in the fridge and let it cool again. It’s worth the little extra time spent because NOTHING tastes as good as real buttercream icing.

You can take the pattern about 3 rows onto the top of the cake as well, then fill in the rest with white stars. You can use your imagination and add flags, sparklers, candles, whatever you wish on top of the white space to spruce it up. This truly is such an easy Fourth of July cake, I promise!

All that’s left is slicing, serving and listening to the ooh’s and aah’s over your amazing (easy!) masterpiece. I actually served this Canada day to friends of ours who came over to visit. The life of a food blogger, if you want to get your recipes to your readers in time for them to make it, you’re baking days ahead of the event.

Happy Fourth of July wishes to all my American readers on Wednesday! I hope your day will be  full of family, friends and good eats!

Love,

The Totally Having Fun With All These Cakes Magpie