We are settled here in Utah now.  Not sure what we are doing about the business at this point but I’ll keep you posted.  It’s similar to living in Colorado to this point.  We are a little lower in elevation but still have to make the adjustments so things don’t bake out of the oven or crisp on the bottom.

One sign that I am settled is that I can bake and want to bake.  It just so happens that worked out to be the same time as celebrating America.  So thanks to ideas on Pinterest. I decided to use my own vanilla cake recipe to make a fun and festive cake for the fourth.

I decided on vanilla because it’s light and it’s so darn hot around here.  Plus everyone loves it.  So I added blue coloring to 1/3 of the vanilla batter and red coloring to another 1/3 of the batter.  I put them into 8 inch pans and baked them up.  After the cakes cooled and I leveled them, I used a 4 inch circle cookie cutter and cut the centers of each cake.  So I had small circle of each color, red, white and blue and a large outer circle of each color, red, white, and blue.  Are you following me?  I should add here that I double my vanilla cake recipe to have enough cake.

Then I place the red center in the blue ring and put it on the cake board.  After a layer of vanilla buttercream, I added the next layer of the blue center with white ring and covered it with vanilla buttercream.  I add the last layer of white center and red ring to the top and covered the cake with vanilla buttercream.  I used the star tip (tip 18) to place 2 rows of white stars followed by 1 row of blue stars (tip 21) all the way to the top.  I used a star-shaped cookie cutter (4 inches) to make an outline for me to follow and did the outline in blue and filled it in with red tinted buttercream stars (tip 18).

My critics (the kids and husband) were all about it.  They loved the way it looked and the taste, of course.  I knew they would love the taste.  I like how it turned out.  We had way too much cake leftover the just the 5 of us but it was festive and just what I need to relax after all the unpacking!