America's Birthday Cake

A couple weeks ago I came across a post from, 17andbaking where she had made the coolest cake for her July 4th celebration.  I definitely wanted to try it.  It seemed to combine a couple things I loved: quilting, baking, and licking the bowl.

This was our end result:

What?  No...that picture wasn't taken as it sat in our fridge.  That's sooo lazy.

Actually, it was cowardly.  I thought the less I touched it, the better off we were.

Anyway - rewind:  First you need one layer of red cake, one layer of white cake, and one layer of blue cake.

Mike came up and asked if I was trying out the army's olive drab color on the end.  Such a comic.  Then his son came up and asked if I was making a cake to look like Yoda.  That extra white one on the end is actually being processed into cake balls this afternoon.

Anyway - you level the white, red and blue cakes.  Maddie and I discovered we aren't good at this.

I even purchased this handy cake leveler.  The blue cake was supposed to be leveled at two inches.  Ours, standing on it's tippy-toes barely reached two inches at it's uppermost crumb.  Next time I would make eight inch round cakes instead of nine inch.

So, we leveled it around maybe 1 1/2 inches.  Maybe.  But whatever it was, we took the red and white layers and leveled them at half that height (now having two red layers, two white layers, and one blue layer).

We cut a hole that was big enough to leave a two inch gap around the perimeter of one red layer, one white layer and the blue cake. 

Next we put the pieces together, which I told Maddie was like quilting.  All these separate shapes coming together to make our one cake.  I'm deep, I tell 'ya.

Then we frosted it.  We tried a cream cheese frosting on the website we got the cake idea from.  Honestly - it went over so-so.  Maddie loved the frosting, I liked it, but it got to be a bit much and I think the rest of the crew was split about the same.

That's pathetic.  It looks like a cake from a Dr. Seuss book.  We also need work on our frosting skills.

After dinner at my parents' house, we pulled out our pièce de résistance. 

Vanna showing off our amazing efforts:

Very fun to make.  And the cake leftovers, as I mentioned are being used to make cake pops which Maddie and I will be tackling shortly.

(image from bakerella.com)

Except ours will look nothing like these.  Wish us luck.