4th of July Cakes

Joe's family (which includes Emily) are all big fans of the Food Network. Early on the week of July 4th Joe casually challenged his little sister, Kate, to a 4th of July themed cake decorating contest. Next thing we knew, members of Joe's family from Virginia to Utah to Hawaii had tossed their hats into the ring and wanted to participate in the contest. Now, none of us really know what we're doing. Most of our training comes from watching Ace of Cakes on the Food Network. But we thought this could be fun.

In the end Kate got sick a day before the 4th, so she wasn't able to make a cake (though she insists she would have won if she had). We ended up with entries from Joe and Emily, Joe's brother Alex, his brother Andrew, his mom, and his Aunt Beth.

The guidelines were that it had to be flag themed, you could only use two cake boxes, and you could work on it as much as you wanted in a 24 hour window from when you started (there were enough time zones involved that it was difficult to lock down an official start time that wasn't insanely early or late for one of the participants). We learned from this year's endeavor that if we do this in the future we may want to have separate categories for those who work in fondant, and those who work with frosting. The cakes just look wildly different depending on what was used.

Here are the frosted entries, from Joe's Mom (the first official U.S. flag) and his brother Alex (an inversion of the Confederate flag (an intriguing choice for the 4th of July, but he does live in Virginia)):


And here are the fondanted cakes from Joe's brother Andrew (a liberty bell and flag) and his Aunt Beth (a flag themed 3D cake):



Joe had in mind using the Gadsden flag for the basis of his cake. The Gadsden flag is from back in the colonial days of yore and looks like this:


It was hard to ration out the two cake mix boxes appropriately to be able to build a three dimensional coiled snake with 3 coils, but in the end it worked out alright. Joe baked the cakes and carved them, and Emily helped with putting the fondant onto it:


Several members of the family who had not made any cakes helped to judge, but in the end Joe and Beth's cakes were tied for first place. So Joe's neice Sophia (4 years old) was called on in as a tiebreaker. She had to say which she liked better, and she chose the one with the snake on it. So Joe won the first 4th of July cake decorating contest in his family.