American Flag Cake

As I mentioned in November’s Flavour of the Month post, I recently celebrated my twenty first birthday with an American themed party.  Besides red frat party cups, a patriotic tablecloth and hundred-dollar bill napkins, I of course wanted to provide some kind of American-themed cake.  While researching my top American-inspired cakes, I stumbled across a possible candidate:

Presented with this beautiful example, I found myself asking the fatal question: how hard could it be?

It turned out to be pretty tricky.  For the red and white cakes, I used Mary Berry’s Victoria sponge recipe, placing half of the mixture into one cake tin before gently mixing strawberry flavouring and red food colouring into the other half, until it tasted sufficiently of strawberry and was red enough to shame a particularly scarlet parrot.  So far so good, but then came the bake.  Despite a sincere plea to the God of Cake, both refused to rise, and the red cake turned a puzzling and infuriating shade of orange.  To cut a long story short, I had to make two more the next day, the white half of which came out of the oven raw while the red part was only half baked.  I used the excess vanilla sponge from the first white layer, trying to hide the chunk I had already cut out of it to taste.

 For the blue layer, I used Next’s Simply Chocolate white chocolate cake, mixing in blue food dye at the end.  I also added white chocolate stars, but these melted in the mixture, which involves melted chocolate.  This also refused to cook properly in the middle, although this did not matter as I was only using the outside.  I wanted to cover the whole thing in a perfect, white coating of cream cheese icing, but in a finally act of malice from the God of Cake, crumbs stuck, cake crumbled and icing stubbornly refused to do what it was told.  Having glued all the layers together with icing, I turned desperately to my supply of spare fondant icing from the Halloween ghosts.  Although I did not quite manage to roll out enough to fit over the cake in one go, I sort of patched it together.  In a last ditch attempt to beautify what I know saw as sugary, messy lump, I made a glue from icing sugar and water and stuck little red, white and blue balls of icing in the shape ‘USA’.

 When it came time for the great reveal and I was a curious combination of anxious and mortified.  I was supposed to be good at baking, and now all my friends would be given proof to the contrary.  I took my shiny, purple knife and sliced through the layers of icing and wrecked cake and found... that it had worked: to my astonishment, there was, in fact, a passable representation of the Stars and Stripes peering out from beneath the layers of icing.  

It was not perfect, by any stretch of even the kindest person’s imagination; there was a slit down the middle, the layers were wonky and two stripes were more orange than red.  However, everyone seemed fairly impressed and managed to eat it while looking convincingly happy.  Not quite the American Dream, but not a nightmare either.