Lively Liv: {4th of july cake}

Thursday, July 5, 2012

{4th of july cake}

First of all....HAPPY {belated} 4th!! I'm so lucky & proud to be an American. I may have dreams of living in Paris or London, but I'm so fortunate to live here!

My mom & stepdad have been spending the past few days at the beach, so Dyl & I have the house ALLLLLL to ourselves. So what do we do?

BAKE!

We had a half-day on Tuesday from work, so once that was finished, we got started. I'm known for my "rainbow" cake in my family, so I thought I'd do something similar for this Independence Day one.

Click below to see more....

What you need:

4th of July Cake

Ingredients:

2 boxes of cake mix {preferably white cake} & everything you need to make it
food coloring
8 1/2 or 9 inch cake pans {tin ones are fine!}
2 cans of frosting {I like cream cheese}

Just a starting note....ONE box of cake mix = 2 layers of cake.

1. Using ONE box, make the batter.

2. Butter each pan REALLY well....even the sides. It's crucial that the cakes come out of the pan easily.

3. Color the batter!

I used about 75 drops of red dye for the red layers. Crazy, I know. But I was working with yellow cake...not white...so I had to use more. {There is no gluten-free white cake that I know of...}

4. Split the {one box of} batter into TWO pans equally. Since there will be less in each pan, make sure you shimmy it around so it spreads out evenly.

Here they are all baked.

I baked the second box right after the red cakes came out of the oven. I didn't color these, but kept them yellow...so I could alternate colors.

NOTE: Bake the cake about 10 minutes LESS than what the box says, because it's half the amount of cake in each pan. Mine took 15 minutes each.

To get some blue in this 4th of July cake, I decided to make the icing layers blue. This pic is out of focus, but you can clearly see what shade I went with.

If the cake is super rounded on top, take a large knife & trim it down a little bit. When you stack them, you want them to be as flat as possible.

5. Now you can start to carefully stack the cakes, while icing each in between.

So I was a dummy & didn't realize 3 of my pans were 81/2 inches & one was 9in. As you can see below, I had to shave some of the side off of the top layer. I never claimed to be perfect :)