29/99: Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting on a flag cake!

 

Happy Independence Day!

I saw Jenn's post on the American flag cake last week and about died. I had to try it.  She got it from Glorious Treats. It is such a fun, festive cake! I've never seen anything like it!

I intentionally didn't do much to the outside of it.  I was kind of going for an element of surprise. I took it to a party like this:

 

It was so much fun cutting into it and letting everyone be surprised about what was actually in it:

  

 This cake shouldn't have been that hard, but of course something went wrong so it took longer than expected.  Since I wasn't using a cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes, I decided that it would be so much quicker to just use a cake box mix. I felt like I was cheating but I got the box mix out of the pantry and started baking.  I seriously felt strange the whole time and when I put it in the pan something just seemed wrong. It didn't fill up the pan enough but I thought that might be because I'm used to baking them from scratch.

It baked for about 25 minutes and I was nervous the whole time. Something was really not right. I looked in the oven and they weren't rising. How do you screw up a cake box cake? How can I make cakes from scratch every week and then screw up a cake from a box!?

When I finally took them out, they were about 1/4 inch tall. Furthermore, they were completely stuck to the sides of the pan and were not interested in moving. 

The problem: the cake mix expired in 2008. Gross.

So I have officially sworn off ever using cake boxes again.  Of course the one time I use one it totally goes wrong. Karma...

So for these cakes, I opened up the Cake Bible (also by Rose) and made two batches of her white chocolate whisper cake. 

After preparing your 8" cake pans, you dye the batter for two of the cakes red and one of them blue. 

You end up with this:

Then it's time to get cutting. You cut all the cakes in half except the blue one.  Then you cut a 4" circle out of a white cake, a red cake, and the middle of the blue cake. This is what you get:

Then you just start stacking, putting icing in between each layer: Red cake, white cake, red cake. Then the big blue one with a hole in the middle with the little white cake and the little red cake in the middle. It'll look like this:

 

Then you just ice it up! I used the dreamy creamy white chocolate frosting from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.  It's funny because all of the comments that I heard about the cake centered on the icing. 

I took it to a fourth of July party and then to the grove.  Everyone loved the flag and seemed to like the cake as well.

One girl said, "I could seriously lick this icing off the cake."

I did have to adapt the icing a little bit from the original recipe.  It did not include any sugar because it has cream cheese and tons of white chocolate.  It also says to combine it in the food processor.  I knew that it would be too runny if I did that so I ended up whipping it in the mixer and adding about a cup of powdered sugar to make it a bit fluffier. 

The cake was good, definitely better than a cake box.  I think my favorite part about it though was the effect of cutting into it.

Rose's Heavenly Cakes

Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting- page 301

The Cake Bible

White Chocolate Whisper Cake- page 50