So, I couldn’t get this cake out of my head and I gave it a try. Two days later, we had a cake that made the group of kids gathered around the picnic table cheer when it was sliced open. What fun!
I used this recipe, though I had to take my own notes and draw a diagram to understand the layering. I contemplated a lot of different white cake recipes, playing the ‘how many eggs do I have and does it use’ game, but in the end, I’m really glad I went with this base. It was a little delicate to work with, but the flavor was outstanding. The stripes were made possible by this inexpensive, amazing tool. I frosted it with the vanilla bean buttercream from Tom Douglas’s Dahlia Cookbook. The recipe can also be found here – double the amount, using four egg whites for just enough to fill and frost the cake. It’s basically a layer cake with a tricky top layer. Using a bowl to cut out a small circle, I swapped in one red and one white half layer into a ring-shaped full height blue layer.
There was a lot of left over cake (thus why I had tried to find a different white cake recipe.) I used it to fake my way through a trifle, with whipped cream, amaretto, and berries.
And just for good measure, there were also these sugar cookies… We might have gotten a little crazy with the food coloring. Perhaps next year, I’ll experiment with natural dyes.
Small Potatoes 