My Polished Patriotic Party Cake...

was a smash! (A friend gave me the title for today's post!) I got this idea from i am baker's blog. Amanda came up with this simple Rose Cake and has now made it even better! For those that have thought about cake decorating...this is the first cake you should ever make or at the very least decorate the outside of the cake using Amanda's rose technique. This is where I started with cake decorating and it was super easy to make. Even when I decided to recreate the vertical layers i am baker did on the original rose cake. Here is a picture of my first Rose Cake. I had made this cake for the first baby shower cake I ever made.

Rose design in butter cream icing

Vertical Pink and Chocolate Stripes.

This weekend we celebrated Memorial Day early by having friends over for a cookout. I of course had to make a cake for the occasion. Lately I haven't had a reason to bake!!! *Note to self...start working my way through the Cake Boss' cookbook again and send in with Travis to work!!!

Amanda at i am baker, came up with a patriotic twist to her rose cake. I just had to try it this weekend! So after checking out how she made her's, I got to work! Because I wanted a white cake base, I decided to go with boxed mixes as I haven't found a white cake recipe I like yet! I picked up 3 boxes of vanilla cake mix. Using 9" round pans I made one red, white, and blue layer. To have proper height for each layer I ended up having to use an entire box of mix for each layer.

Also remember when coloring that gel coloring works best. A tip for the red layer: be sure to start with a pink base then add 'NO TASTE red'. This will give you a good red color but not having it tasting nasty! I did add a little of 'red red' and 'Christmas red' to mine, but not much! For the blue I used 'sky blue' and a fair amount of it. I think it would have looked better with royal blue, but I didn't have any! Another note about icing colors...when working with darker colors such as red and blue, if possible make the icing the day before and color it. Darker icing will enhance in color over night. I unfortunately ran out of time the night before and therefore had to settle with what I got day of. It still looked fabulous though!

Now...drum roll please.......

TA DA....

I started with these....

To make this...

and decorate it like this!

One of my favorite views!

and finally how the inside of the cake looks!

This cake was fun to make and tasted awesome. In fact...I was told it was one of my best yet! I think it was the vanilla cake mix that did the trick! This is a fun way to celebrate the holidays!