About mid-June, my email and news feeds start filling with a million 4th of July related recipes. Deserts wearing the red, white and blue as well as appetizers and party type foods seem the most plentiful. I saw one recipe, Red, White and Blue Hombre Cake and it was so pretty, I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. I printed it and though I didn’t have time to make it before the holiday, today, I finally did. https://www.pillsburybaking.com/recipes/red-white-and-blue-ombre-cake-7493. The first disclaimer is the recipe calls for 8″ cake pans and my pans were 9″ but, I knew I could make it work. I hardly ever follow a recipe to a T, but, I wanted to find out what I like and don’t like about this one. So, I made the cake mixes and colored the frosting. I quickly found that using common food coloring from Walmart I could not duplicate the beautiful colors in the photos even though I even added extra color.
Once the layers were all cooled, I set about frosting the layers. Let me say that I wish I would have stored the frosting in the refrigerator so it wouldn’t have been as soft as it was and I also wish I would have used homemade butter cream frosting. I am terrible at frosting cakes and though I always have high hopes each time I bake a cake, I am reminded that my creative mind does not extend that direction. So, I resigned myself to just getting the job done. I was horribly disappointed that I was not able to make the cake as pretty as I wanted it to look and how I was not able to get real blue and red colors but, in the end, I finished it. I think with professional colors and using the correct size cake pans, it would have turned out better in my mind. The cake tasted fine, but, it also was not moist like I really like a cake to be, so, I would make this cake again, but, use my own cake recipe and use butter cream frosting.
Love this! Wonder where we get good food coloring?! I actually never thought about there being ‘better’ ‘stronger’ food coloring!