Two things I'm not good at are singing and cake decorating. There's no hope for the singing, but after making my second Hidden Flag Cake with Whipped Cream Cheese Icing, there is a glimmer. I made the cake in the first picture over 10 years, then never again until yesterday. There's been progress, just slow progress. If you'd like to try the cake, there's more info below. If you'd rather just make the Whipped Cream Cheese Icing and use it for something else, jump to the recipe!
Jump to Recipe
New Flag Cake Photo
Here's the new cake. I originally found it on a blog called 17 and Baking, which Elissa kindly left up for the past decade. She hasn't updated in a while, so I've typed up a rundown on how to put it together along with some things I've learned along the way. I'll bet if you check You Tube or any other blog with Hidden Flag Cake, you can find better instructions. But here's how I did it.
Hidden Flag Cake Instructions
What You'll Need
- 2 or 3 boxes of white cake mix plus enough ingredients to make it (egg whites, oil and water). Wal*Mart's white cake is is only 98 cents a box.
- 3 9-inch round pans, preferably ones that are 3-inches deep, but there are ways you can do this with 2-inch deep pans if that's all you have.
- Good quality food color such as Wilton Royal Blue get (or Americolor) and Christmas Red. Regrettably, these were not what were used for the photos. More on that later.
- The recipe for Whipped Cream Cheese Icing in the card
Step One
Using 2 boxes of white cake mix and doubling all ingredients, make 3 9-inch round cakes using pans that are 3 inches deep. Dye one layer blue, one red and leave one white. Bake the cakes at 325 degrees F. rather than 350 degrees F. for a slightly longer time to help them bake more evenly.
- The pros of using cake mix cake are you will not have wasted much time if things go wrong. The cons are the cake mix cakes are softer and more difficult to carve. Freezing can help. I used Walmart White Cake Mix for this cake and needed 3 boxes because I messed up my carving. Ideally, you can make this with just 2 boxes.
- More ideally, scratch! This recipe would be a great one, but you'd need to make it at least twice for enough batter. Two boxes of cake mix make about 64 oz of batter.
- With the 3-inch high cake pans you can make each layer fairly tall. Also, the higher sided cake pans will help keep the layers from doming quite as much, as does baking at a slightly lower temperature than suggested on the box.
- Due to losing one of my layers to sloppy carving, I ended up making the white layers again using a third box of cake mix, dividing it between two 9-inch pans and just trimming the tops. This was much easier than trying to split evenly.
- If you are not good at carving, you may want to use 3 boxes of cake mix. Make the blue layer in one deep pan, red layer divided into two and white layer divided into two, then trim tops to make even cakes (stripes). This method will also give you a taller cake. You'll still need to use the deep cake pan for the blue, so you really do need the 3 inch deep pans.
Step Two
Set aside the blue layer. Using a serrated knife, slice both the red layer and white layer in half so that you have two white layers and two red layers. Again, this is the tricky step. They need to be even. If using cake mix, freeze the cakes until partially frozen and carve while partially frozen.
- For the colors, I used Betty Crocker Color Gel and the blue was too light (as pictured). I didn't feel like going to Michael's to find Wilton Royal Blue, which is what I should have used. Wilton will give you deeper, richer, color. Americolor would be a good option too, but unless you have a cake decorating store nearby you'll have to order it.
- It would also be fun to make this with white cake and red velvet, but you'd need to use a really vivid red velvet recipe such as this one and I'm not sure how it would look with the blue. Again, you'd need a really dark blue, unless you wanted to just have fun and do something like blueberry, in which case the cake would hide a pretty wacky looking flag. I may do this. Strawberry cake mix would also be good. Or why not just do white, strawberry and use chocolate in place of blue?
Step Three
Set aside one white layer and one red layer. Stack remaining white and red layers and put blue layer on top. Cut a big circle (somewhere around 4 inches) in the middle so that you end up with red, white and blue rings and red, white and blue circles. You will only use the blue ring and the red and white circles.
- This is a problem with the cake. Your scraps are two full rings of red and white cake and a blue circle. What you can do is stack the leftover white and red rings around the blue circle scrap, wrap, freeze and make another wacky colored red, white and blue cake.
Step Four
Assemble! Set the uncut bottom white layer on a plate and frost with a very thin layer of frosting. Stack the uncut red layer on top and frost. Set the blue ring on the red layer, then stack the circle scrapes, white and then red, in the center. Frost the cake.
- Note: The original directions said to put a thin layer of icing on the inside of the blue ring to help it stick, but it looks better without it and the cake should still stick.
- The Whipped Cream Cheese Icing is light and easy to spread. Yay!
Whipped Cream Cheese Icing
If you read all of this and don't want to attempt the carving, you can just make three layers of white cake, dye one red, one blue and leave one white. That's also kind of a hidden flag, right? Then you can frost it with this reliably good icing.
Recipe
Whipped Cream Cheese Icing
Ingredients
- ½ cup heavy cream cold
- 8 oz cream cheese softened
- 2 oz unsalted or salted butter softened
- 2 cups confectioners’ sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice fresh
Instructions
- In a mixing bowl, beat the whipping cream until stiff peaks form and set aside.
- In a second bowl, beat the cream cheese, butter, confectioners’ sugar, vanilla and lemon juice until creamy.
- Stir the whipped cream into the cream cheese mixture.
Debbie Fabre says
I love this Anna. I must do it for the next patriotic holiday!! Good job.
Linda says
I just finished baking the layers, and here's what I found...I did add a touch of black food coloring to the blue batter and it did make it a nice dark blue. Anna, as usual, was correct about the non-pariels. I took a bit of the blue batter, divided it into three, added silver mini n.p. to one, white mini n.p. to one, and white "jimmies" to one; and baked each in a mini foil cup. The jimmies and the silver n.p. pretty much disappeared into the batter, the white ones did hold up but because of the randomness of the distribution, they just looked odd, so I baked the layer with no additions. The full layers are cooling right now, and I will say that they look awfully thin. I made a white cake from an old Betty Crocker cookbook, and I chose it because of the 4 recipes I looked at, this one had the most flour and sugar, thinking that would end out giving me the most cake. I will be sure they're very cold before I split them, but I'm a bit concerned about how thin they'll be. I don't plan to do that until tomorrow, so I have time for "Plan B" if it doesn't work out.
Anna says
Wow, I'm interested in seeing how this works out.
Linda says
That's what I thought I'd do. I'm also going to add just a scootch of black food coloring to the blue to make it darker, also as part of the experiment. I'll let you know what happens
Anna says
Linda, it's an interesting idea, but I don't think they'd sparkle or really stand out. Maybe you could put some in a small portion of the blue cake for an experiment.
Linda says
This is so neat! I'm going to give it a try and take it to our friend's annual party. For at least the last 25 years, pretty much the same group gathers in their backyard to watch the Town's fireworks display, preceded by appetizers and followed by dessert, which has always been my "job". I'm wondering if it would work to add some mini-nonpariels to the blue batter to get a "starry" effect. I have silver and white. The white may take on the blue coloring though...what do you think?
LisAway says
Wow, Anna. IMO yours looks better than 17's AND Duncan Heinz. Seriously. If I decide to attempt this I will try to make the same mistakes you did. 🙂
Martha in KS says
You are such a fabulous baker (or bored silly with your family gone). Well done!
Amy @ What Jew Wanna Eat says
Such a cool cake! I'm definitely going to try this.
Dorothy @ Crazy for Crust says
That's a gorgeous cake! Love it, so pretty!
Kim F. says
Awesome!
Katrina says
Looks great and I don't anyone who'd see yours and think it doesn't look very good.
Sue says
Very patriotic! I'm impressed!!
Anna says
I got a little confused too. You're supposed to make three layers in 9 inch round pans, dye one blue, one red and leave the third white. You set the blue layer aside, then split the red and white layers horizontally so that you have 2 thin layers of red and 2 thin layers of white. Where things got confusing was the stacking and cutting.
You set aside one of the thin layers of white and one of the thin layers of red to be your two base layers. Next, you stack the remaining thin layer of white and thin layer of red on top of your un-cut blue layer. With a knife, you make a donut hole like cut in the middle, the point of which is to give you three big rings and three small circles (the doughnut hole, so to speak). You discard the red and white ring and the blue middle, then assemble by stacking your original white and red bases, and the blue ring. Then you take the little red and white donut hole cut outs, slice them, and stack those in the middle of the blue ring.
I screwed it up by accidentally stacking ALL The layers and cutting the big donut hole hole through all of them. I fixed it by just squashing the cut out circles back into the base circles.
Here's a tip for anyone else who wants to try this. Make sure your cake layers are very cold before you do any slices. They're much easier to work with that way. You may want to even freeze the rings before assembling. That is, cool, cut, freeze on parchment lined baking sheets, then do your building and frosting.
Cheryl, I think the red velvet stripes would be okay. I can't remember just how vivid-red cake mix red velvet is, but it would probably still resemble a flag. Using strawberry and adding a little more red paste would give you a nice, bright, shade of red.
Also, make sure to use Wilton paste and not the grocery store type. I used Royal Blue and Red-Red.
Cheryl says
Wonder how the red layer would look from a red velvet cake recipe? Dunican Hines suggests their strawberry cake mix for the red layer.
Chewthefat says
I agree with Louise--not only is that spectacular, but it looks even better than the cake in the linked recipe!
I found the assembly instructions a bit confusing in the link, although the photograph of the cake being assembled was pretty decent about showing how to do it. This is truly an impressive cake!