A patriotic cake

I know I've been AWOL for most of the summer in regards to blogging, but I have some really fun project to share with you. July is always busy for me with lots of family parties and reunions, and I took advantage of every opportunity to bake when I could.

I knew I wanted to do a 4th of July cake, but that there wouldn't be a ton of people home this year to help eat it so I started looking at ideas for smaller cakes that don't feed an army. It was my niece who came up with the eventual design ideas, including the fun surprise inside.
We decided to make the cake three layers tall and six inches deep, which I figured should make the cake about eight inches tall. Em wanted to color the batter, so we did vanilla cake and mixed each pan in a shade or red, white or blue.

After they baked and chilled, I stacked them with vanilla butter cream between the layers. Next I marked lines around the cake with a tooth pick so I would have nice, even layers. I Just touched my toothpick to it and turned the turntable.

My niece baked star-shaped sugar cookies, and I melted some white chocolate chips and dipped them in it to make them really white. I have some craft wire I purchased for cakes, but couldn't find it, so I ended up using toothpicks to stick them out of the cake. If we'd thought far enough ahead, I could have done the stars out of fondant or gum paste instead, but I didn't want to take the time.

The red and white stripes were made with a medium star tip. Unfortunately for us, everyone saw this and thought Cat in the Hat instead of firecracker. =) It would be easy enough to put the cake on a foil-wrapped and frosting-coated cake circle to make it look like Cat in the Hat, if that was your intention.
And here it is with a big slice out of it so you can see all the layers. It turned out really yummy!