Forth of July

Inside and Out

I made this cake this year for a Forth of July party at my mother-in-laws house.  It turned out to be a great center piece at the table and everyone was impressed by  not only the exterior but the cake on the inside once cut. It can be hard to color icing red, but I found that by adding canned pie filling (specifically, I used cherry) gave the icing the start to the red color and then it took less food coloring to get that deep red. The red food dye often makes such a bitter flavor but the cherry was a nice surprise.  I also used a combination of cake flavors for the colored cakes on the inside to make the cake look like a flag once cut. I tried this cake with both cake mixes as well as cakes from scratch and both turned out really well. The cake from scratch I used pureed beets to make the red cake. The cake was very flavorful but much more dense then expected. It did not rise as much as I had hoped but still worked. Then for the blue from scratch cake, I added blue berries to start the coloring which also gave an added flavor to the cake. It was quite an experiment that turned out to be very tasty.

The forth of July cake was fairly easy to assemble. I just made 8 in round red, white and blue cakes. I then cut the center out of the blue cake and the outer ring off a white and red cake and inserted the red and white in the center of the outer blue ring for the top of the cake.