Kids love baking and decorating a cake that looks like an American flag and tastes great! Blueberries serve as stars with white frosting and red stripes .
Soon the Fourth of July will be here and we will be celebrating America’s Independence Day with picnics, reunions, and fireworks. For a grand celebration treat, kids can bake and decorate a cool and yummy flag cake.
The Fourth of July cake is baked in a rectangular cake pan (9 x13 in. size). Start with a white cake mix. Bake and cool by the box’s instructions. Turn out onto a stiff cardboard or large cookie sheet covered and edged with aluminum foil.
Frost the cake with vanilla butter cream frosting or seven-minute frosting smoothed as flat as possible. Leaving in the upper left corner, a small field for the stars, sprinkle the rest with coconut flakes.
Thirteen Stripes:
To form thirteen red and white stripes use a frosting tube of red colored writing icing. Start with a red stripe (6 in all) and finish with red on the bottom of the cake. Four red half-lines and three white half-lines should fill in the top half of the cake, with the remaining full-lines, first a white line, then red, another white, another red, white, and a red last.
Star Field:
Use blueberries to make rows of stars in the upper left corner. The rows should have six rows of five stars across with five rows of four spaced between them. So that the rows of stars from the left edge have 5 stars, then 4, 5, then 4, 5, 4, 5, 4, 5, 4, 5 to the half stripes. You should have six rows of 5 each and five rows of four each for a total of fifty stars.
Optional changes:
- Try poking holes in the cooling cake and pouring in strawberry jello which has been dissolved in hot water and cooled.
- Then frost the cake with whipped cream. (Keep chilled well until serving.)
- Add a corner of blueberries.
- Another version of the flag cake uses strawberry slices to form the red stripes.
- Make the red stripes with red licorice strips.
- Blue frosting and any white soft candies or 50 white dots of frosting can form the star field.
- Use maraschino cherries to form the stripes. Cut each in half and line them quickly to form the seven red strips and six white stripes, starting and ending with red.
- Fill the field with blue icing and make stars with white yogurt raisins.
It doesn't have to be perfect:
Remember that the cake is working as a table decoration to delight the eyes, and yet the first purpose for the cake is to be eaten, so don’t sacrifice flavor for looks. Use complimentary flavors, and red, white, and blue colors, and people will love your American flag cake.
Stars and stripes may come out a little mixed up and numbered wrong, but that won’t matter if the cake is cool and delicious! Happy Independence Day!
