The last time Fuzz returned from camp, I welcomed her home with red, white and blue sugar cookies. This time I got a little fancy!
Or tried to, at least. I didn’t think my attempt at the famous hidden flag cake would amount to much, but I’m feeling so proud of this cake that I messaged a photo of it to Todd and Fuzz, who are wandering around JFK somewhere. Fuzz has been gone for 4 weeks, and I’m hoping I can make the rest of her summer as interesting as camp. Probably not, but the food should better.
For those of you who haven’t seen this flag cake, it’s from a blog called 17 and Baking. You can bake the cake using any recipe you want and just follow her instructions for assembly.
For a larger flag cake, Duncan Hines developed their own Hidden Flag Cake using both strawberry and white cake mix. I may try that one this week as well, but I think my next order of business will be making a repeat of this flag cake using a good scratch white cake recipe. For this practice cake, I used the white almond sour cream wedding cake recipe and my favorite cream cheese frosting recipe. Here’s the frosting recipe. Use whatever cake recipe you like and follow the directions over on 17 and Baking.
- 1/2 cup heavy cream, cold
- 8 oz cream cheese, softened
- 2 oz unsalted or salted butter, softened
- 2 cups confectioners’ sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice, fresh
- In a mixing bowl, beat the whipping cream until stiff peaks form and set aside.
- In a second bowl, beat the cream cheese, butter, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla and lemon juice until creamy.
- Stir the whipped cream into the cream cheese mixture.
Anna, I hadn’t seen the Hidden Flag Cake before, but your results are so much better than the 17 and Baking Cake. Whatever you did gave a great result.
I hope Todd and Fuzz are now on a plane back to Austin and not still wandering around JFK. I’m sure Fuzz will be excited to be home and share all her camping stories with you.
I agree with Louise–not only is that spectacular, but it looks even better than the cake in the linked recipe!
I found the assembly instructions a bit confusing in the link, although the photograph of the cake being assembled was pretty decent about showing how to do it. This is truly an impressive cake!
Wonder how the red layer would look from a red velvet cake recipe? Dunican Hines suggests their strawberry cake mix for the red layer.
I got a little confused too. You’re supposed to make three layers in 9 inch round pans, dye one blue, one red and leave the third white. You set the blue layer aside, then split the red and white layers horizontally so that you have 2 thin layers of red and 2 thin layers of white. Where things got confusing was the stacking and cutting.
You set aside one of the thin layers of white and one of the thin layers of red to be your two base layers. Next, you stack the remaining thin layer of white and thin layer of red on top of your un-cut blue layer. With a knife, you make a donut hole like cut in the middle, the point of which is to give you three big rings and three small circles (the doughnut hole, so to speak). You discard the red and white ring and the blue middle, then assemble by stacking your original white and red bases, and the blue ring. Then you take the little red and white donut hole cut outs, slice them, and stack those in the middle of the blue ring.
I screwed it up by accidentally stacking ALL The layers and cutting the big donut hole hole through all of them. I fixed it by just squashing the cut out circles back into the base circles.
Here’s a tip for anyone else who wants to try this. Make sure your cake layers are very cold before you do any slices. They’re much easier to work with that way. You may want to even freeze the rings before assembling. That is, cool, cut, freeze on parchment lined baking sheets, then do your building and frosting.
Cheryl, I think the red velvet stripes would be okay. I can’t remember just how vivid-red cake mix red velvet is, but it would probably still resemble a flag. Using strawberry and adding a little more red paste would give you a nice, bright, shade of red.
Also, make sure to use Wilton paste and not the grocery store type. I used Royal Blue and Red-Red.
Very patriotic! I’m impressed!!
Looks great and I don’t anyone who’d see yours and think it doesn’t look very good.
Awesome!
That’s a gorgeous cake! Love it, so pretty!
Such a cool cake! I’m definitely going to try this.
You are such a fabulous baker (or bored silly with your family gone). Well done!
Wow, Anna. IMO yours looks better than 17’s AND Duncan Heinz. Seriously. If I decide to attempt this I will try to make the same mistakes you did.
This is so neat! I’m going to give it a try and take it to our friend’s annual party. For at least the last 25 years, pretty much the same group gathers in their backyard to watch the Town’s fireworks display, preceded by appetizers and followed by dessert, which has always been my “job”. I’m wondering if it would work to add some mini-nonpariels to the blue batter to get a “starry” effect. I have silver and white. The white may take on the blue coloring though…what do you think?
Linda, it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think they’d sparkle or really stand out. Maybe you could put some in a small portion of the blue cake for an experiment.
That’s what I thought I’d do. I’m also going to add just a scootch of black food coloring to the blue to make it darker, also as part of the experiment. I’ll let you know what happens
Wow, I’m interested in seeing how this works out.
I just finished baking the layers, and here’s what I found…I did add a touch of black food coloring to the blue batter and it did make it a nice dark blue. Anna, as usual, was correct about the non-pariels. I took a bit of the blue batter, divided it into three, added silver mini n.p. to one, white mini n.p. to one, and white “jimmies” to one; and baked each in a mini foil cup. The jimmies and the silver n.p. pretty much disappeared into the batter, the white ones did hold up but because of the randomness of the distribution, they just looked odd, so I baked the layer with no additions. The full layers are cooling right now, and I will say that they look awfully thin. I made a white cake from an old Betty Crocker cookbook, and I chose it because of the 4 recipes I looked at, this one had the most flour and sugar, thinking that would end out giving me the most cake. I will be sure they’re very cold before I split them, but I’m a bit concerned about how thin they’ll be. I don’t plan to do that until tomorrow, so I have time for “Plan B” if it doesn’t work out.
I love this Anna. I must do it for the next patriotic holiday!! Good job.