She’s a Grand Old Flag, She’s a Good-Tasting Flag

I try to continue the family tradition of having a Flag cake for Fourth of July celebrations. I keep trying out new ideas, often coming up with things which bear just a tiny bit of discernible American flag.

When I make a regular, full-sized cake, there’s lots of cake leftovers. To circumvent that, I thought maybe a rolled cake might give everyone a piece of flag-themed cake and a few extra pieces. And, I had an idea. Not necessarily a good idea, but an idea.

I thought I could bake a very shallow white layer and cut out star shapes from it. Then, I could put the white stars on a jelly roll pan and make a blue jelly roll batter to pour over the stars and then bake that. The resulting jelly roll cake would be blue with cute white stars, and then I could color some Cool Whip red and put red and white Cool Whip in the roll. Sounds easy, right?

I found a jelly roll recipe in my big cookbook. Then, I looked online for ideas, too. I found a recipe for a striped cake, that had a white cake batter divided into several different bowls and dyed into bright colors. Then, the instructions said to pipe diagonal stripes across a prepared baking pan. Baked and rolled around a filling and then sliced, it made a lively cake roll. And I thought, “Well, I could put the white stars down and pour blue batter over them, on half a pan, and then pipe red and white stripes down the other side, and then wouldn’t that be cute!” I also found a couple of YouTube videos which were even more informative. One baker showed how to make a template with shapes (she used hearts), which she put underneath a piece of waxed paper. She piped cute pink hearts of batter onto the template shapes, put the pan in the freezer, and, when the shapes were frozen, she removed the template, poured a chocolate batter over the hearts, baked it, and, ta-dah!! the cake had cute pink hearts baked into it.

Oh, yeah. I can do that!

I found some star outlines online, made a template, and mixed up a batch of batter. I made my white stars and put the pan in the freezer. It took FOREVER for them to freeze. I put the rest of the batter into the fridge. Several hours later, the star shapes were finally frozen. And by then, I should really have made a new batch of batter, but that seemed wasteful, and really, what difference would it make. (Lots, in case you wondered.) I colored half of the remaining batter blue, one fourth of the batter red, and left the other fourth white. I spread the blue batter across half the pan, over the stars; it was pretty thin. I tried piping red and white stripes across the other side. It was runny. I baked it all (and the pan was rather warped). It was a disaster, but the white stars showed up really well. I threw it all out. That was Wednesday.

Thursday, I watched the video again, and realized that the baker had made a separate, small batch of batter for the hearts. And froze that. So, I followed that recipe and made my white stars. And they froze up really quickly. Then, I used her cake batter recipe, too. The recipe said that flour could be substituted for the cocoa in the original recipe, if one didn’t want a chocolate cake. I did substitute flour, and colored all that batter blue (giving up on the idea of red and white stripes, opting for red and white Cool Whip instead). I followed the recipe carefully, poured the blue batter over the white stars, and put it in to bake. It looked all right after it had baked. The blue batter had gotten under the edges of the stars a little, but things seemed all right. I rolled up the baked cake (as instructed) and let it cool. Then, I unrolled it to get it ready to fill. The edges were a little stiff (which happens to those kinds of cakes) and, as suggested, I trimmed those edges off. I tasted those cut off edges and they were HORRIBLE. HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE. Dry, chewy (not in a good way), and just awful. So, for the second day in a row, I threw out a cake.

Friday, I made the small recipe, put white star shapes on waxed paper to freeze, and then made the original jelly roll cake recipe from the big cookbook, colored the batter blue, and poured it over the white stars. It baked up quite nicely, and, when I tasted the trimmed off edges, they tasted fine. The white stars show up great! After the rolled up cake had cooled, I unrolled it and got out the Cool Whip. Fortunately, I had had enough blue food coloring to tint all the batters I had made. I had used up some red coloring on Cake #1. I had a larger bottle of red coloring, but I chose a smaller, plastic container, thinking it looked like enough for the Cool Whip. I removed the RED lid from the container and squeezed a good amount into some of the Cool Whip. I began to stir it up, and, OllieMollieGollie!!! It was PURPLE! So, I had to dump that out!

Fortunately, there was that bottle of red coloring (which I carefully tried out on a small spoonful of Cool Whip first). So, finally after three days of trying to get a cake made, I finally had one.

As I dropped the large, very, very heavy trash bag into the big trash bin Friday afternoon, I was really sad and frustrated to realize that I had not photographed any of the epic cake fails. You’ll just have to imagine them on your own.

Here’s this year’s photo of Kevin and Jeremy in their “traditional” photo pose and you can also see what this year’s final (finally) cake looked like. We ate almost all of it up. As I write this, there’s one piece left in the fridge. By time you read this, it’ll be gone (I hope).

I’ve also mentioned another tradition, begun by my Ohio grandmother, when the strawberries ripened early in the summer. Strawberry shortcake for dinner.

My sister and I often make it these days, on July 4th. After all those lunchtime burgers and hot dogs and flag cake and ice cream, and whatever snacking might go on during the day, strawberry shortcake makes a nice evening meal. After the company arrived (Kevin and Jeremy and April and Peter), on Tuesday, I made my last trip to the grocery store and added a quart of strawberries to my cart. Wednesday, after cleaning up from the lunchtime meal, I washed and sliced the strawberries and added enough sugar “to make them weep” (my grandmother’s directive). Early evening (well, as it’s summertime, it’s more like late afternoon) I got out the new box of Bisquick to make the shortcakes.