Independence Celebration

What a wonderful vacation we had. Honey took the last half of last week off so we had 5 days with him home. What a treat, unfortunately he threw his back out on the 4th of July so he was laid up and we didn't get to do all the fun things we were planning. But we did get to enjoy some time together as a family. We went to the local park, we played with water balloons in the back yard, we cleaned the house, we watched movies. It was just so wonderful to have time just our family.

Bubba

Princess

Monkey (and he is WALKING!!!)

Our normal 4th of July tradition is to go to Nana and Papa's house. Everyone we know is invited and we always have a blast. This year was no different. Why change things after 16 years? It is always fun to see what new foods are brought. Everyone brings something and it is just one big potluck. There is of course the usual suspects, Pasta salad(by Honey), Shamburgers(by Nana), fruit pizza(Rhonda), then there are always new dishes, Uncle Eddie brought some philippino juice, Mayumii brought vegetarian sushi, and many many other new and exciting dishes.

So my dilemma came in what should I bring? What was unique enough to join these amazing dishes brought and made by some amazing people? Ah Ha! I found a picture for a cake that would WOW everyone. It was much like a birthday cake, and that is ok because after all isn't the 4th of July our countries birthday?

How can I make this?

So I set to planning. I needed many layers of red cake and one big block of blue. Also needed white frosting that would hold up to that many layers. So I bought 2 boxes of Classic Vanilla cake mix. I poured my mix into my kitchen aid mixer and mixed up my cake batter. I then added an exorbitant amount of food coloring. I wanted this cake RED. Then I split it into 3 round cake pans, because that is how many I had. I was amazed to find that it took only about 10 min to cook even though the box said 30  min. Make sure you keep an eye on them and don't let them over cook.

Fairly close to the original. 

I then mixed up the second box of mix and split it into two bowls. I colored one red the same as I did before and the other I did blue. I was very lucky that the blue colors very easily and only takes a small amount of coloring. I then baked them up the same as I did before. I just made sure that my blue one was as deep as possible. Unfortunately it still wasn't quite deep enough to only do one layer of blue in the cake. I had to cut 2 circles out of the blue cake to get it tall enough to make the blue section of the flag.

Now to assemble: I let the cakes cool most the afternoon, then just before bed I sliced them into the layers and froze them. I places foil in between each layer so they wouldn't stick to each other. This way when I woke up in the morning I could frost them without the cake crumbling. What a lifesaver. I then just slathered white frosting onto each red cake piece and stacked them up. Once I had them all stacked up I took a cookie cutter the size of circle I wanted and cut through about 6 layers of the red cake. I then took the same cookie cutter that I cut the red cake with and cut 2 circles out of the blue cake. I put a small amount of frosting in between the two blue layers to make them stick together. I then just slid them into the hole cut into the red cake.

Frosting: I just took the rest of the white can of frosting that I had and began to flat frost the whole cake. Oh no I underestimated how much frosting I was going to need. Luckily stores are still open on the 4th of July. So after picking up Bestie and her girls we made a stop at the store to grab another can of frosting and blue writing gel. And of course being the 4th of July, they were out of Blue gel. They had plenty of the others just no Blue. So I had to buy the set of 4 colors 2 of which I had no use for, today. ;)  So once reaching Nana and Papa's I finished frosting the cake.

Thais is what I came up with

Decorating: Possibly the easiest part of the whole process. I took the red and blue writing gel and make alternating circles. I then took a tooth pick and drew lines alternating directions from the center to the edge and the edge to the center making a nice pattern. Of course Bestie had to say it looked like a spider web and she has a fear of spiders.

A Slice

After a piece was taken

I also wanted to look patriotic. So I bought blue nail polish. You know the stuff that you look at and think that only a 12 year old girl or guys who are rebelling would buy. Yep, I bought that stuff. I painted my nails red, yeah I already had red at home and didn't think I needed yet another bottle of that. I painted them just like normal, two layers let dry in between. I then let them dry completely. I made half circles out of some sticky name tags, you know the kind that they make you wear at your high school reunion or at meetings that you don't want to go to. So after my nails were all dry I placed the half circles on my nails, this would have been easier if I had used those stickers that you put on paper to make sure it doesn't rip out of a binder, but I used what I had. So now with my freshly painted nails covered in half circles I painted blue over them. I took off the stickers before it dried too much. I didn't want it to pull the blue off with the stickers. 

Turned out quite nice