Happy 4th!

Maddie has been on a cake making kick, so we decided she would be in charge of our fourth of July cake.  I let her get on all-recipes to look for something she thought would be fun and easy for her to do.  But then we came across this cake and HAD to try it!  It was so much fun to put together and actually pretty easy.











First you make a yellow or white cake.  I did a yellow cake from scratch combining two recipes that I found online (recipe at end of post)  and I was very pleased.  It had a lemony flavor and turned out very moist and yummy.  You need three 8 or 9 inch layers (my recipe made 8 inch layers).  You dye one red and one blue and leave one white.  Leave the blue layer as is and divide the red and white each in half with dental floss or a sharp, serated knife.  Set a red and white layer aside and stack the remaining red and white layers with the blue layer.  Cut a circle out of the middle of these three.  You will have this:

 

You can discard the outer red and white rings and the inner blue rings, but instead I crumbled them up and stirred in some left over cream cheese icing, topped it with cool whip and had another cake out of the deal.

To assemble you but a white layer on bottom, ice it and then put a red layer and ice it.

Then you put the outer blue ring on and put a thin layer of icing on the inside of it to help the inner layers stay together.  You then fit the inner white and red cirles into the larger blue circle.  Make sure the top is level and ice the cake with desired frosting.  I used a cream cheese frosting recipe but I should have realized that wasn't the best idea in the Beirut humidity in my kitchen with no AC!  It was a little drippy but the cream cheese icing combined with the lemony cake tasted great!

It was melting fast!

Such a fun surprise when you cut into it!

This one will definitely have to become a tradition!  One of the blogs I saw about this cake had a white chocolate frosting recipe that I might try next time to avoid the melting factor...

Such fun!

For more 4th of July fun see this link:  http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179346&id=529238198&l=a9baa148d1