If you’re feeling patriotic and want to make a Hidden Flag Cake, you should give it a try. I did one time, and this was the result. The recipe is from Elissa’s blog 17 and Baking. If my math is correct, Elissa is now 29. Wherever you are, Elissa, thanks again for motivating me to try a flag cake.
There are lots of recipes for Flag Cake out there. For this one, I used a basic doctored white cake recipe and followed the coloring and carving instructions on Elissa’s old blog post. The cake was a lot of fun, but the big takeaway here was that I discovered a really awesome whipped cream cheese icing (or frosting, I guess it’s really frosting) recipe that I’ll use over and over for life. Here’s the recipe.
Recipe
Whipped Cream Cheese Icing
Whipped Cream Cheese Icing
Ingredients
- 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
Instructions
- 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.
Notes
You should get about 2 1/2 cups of icing or enough for 1 standard size cake.
Tried this recipe?Let us know how it was!
Debbie Fabre
I love this Anna. I must do it for the next patriotic holiday!! Good job.
Linda
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.
Anna
Wow, I’m interested in seeing how this works out.
Linda
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
Anna
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.
Linda
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?
LisAway
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. 🙂
Martha in KS
You are such a fabulous baker (or bored silly with your family gone). Well done!
Amy @ What Jew Wanna Eat
Such a cool cake! I’m definitely going to try this.
Dorothy @ Crazy for Crust
That’s a gorgeous cake! Love it, so pretty!
Kim F.
Awesome!
Katrina
Looks great and I don’t anyone who’d see yours and think it doesn’t look very good.
Sue
Very patriotic! I’m impressed!!
Anna
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.
Cheryl
Wonder how the red layer would look from a red velvet cake recipe? Dunican Hines suggests their strawberry cake mix for the red layer.
Chewthefat
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!