Patria Amada, Brasil

This weekend was the 24th birthday of a good friend of mine.  We both spent some time in Sao Paulo, Brasil serving as church missionaries so I decided that for her cake I would do a Brasilian flag.  The Brasilian flag is EVERY WHERE in that city.  The people LOVE it and so do we...

I looked online and saw mostly fondant cakes and I am still sort of anti fondant.  I'm not sure exactly why, but it is what it is.  I set out making a yellow cake.  The recipe I used for this one seemed to take a LONG time to bake.  The top and bottom got done before the inside, thus the outside burned a little, which made me quite mad, but I salvaged it and everything turned out okay.  On the flip side, the cake stayed together really well and was not super crumbly, which is nice for cutting the layers.  I think this recipe would work nicely for a 1'' sheet cake.  Someday I will find the perfect cake recipe, but for now, experimentation is key.  This was my recipe this time, from the better homes and gardens cookbook:

Yellow Cake
3/4 cup butter or margarine
3 eggs
2 1/2 cups flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/4 cups milk

1. Allow butter and eggs to stand a room temp for 30 min.  Grease and flour either 2 9'' pans or 1 9x13 pan.  Mix together all dry ingredients and set aside.
2. Preheat oven to 375.  Beat butter at high speed for 30 seconds.  Gradually add sugar.  Beat 2 minutes more.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.  Beat in vanilla.
3.  Alternate between adding the flour mixture and the milk, beating at low speed until combined each time.
4. Bake 20 to 25 minutes for the rounds or 30 to 35 minutes for the 9x13 or until tooth pick comes out dry.

I used the same wilton butter cream recipe which I am loving more and more.  I also used the same raspberry pie filling that I used for the jersey cake.  This cake was clearly torted, but just with one layer, and then I dirty iced it and stuck it in the freezer for about 30 minutes so I could ice it right away.

The colors for this cake were SO FUN!  Really bright!  (Thanks Brasil!)  I enjoyed using the wilton gel colors and I think they did a great job.

For this cake I frosted the whole thing in green, then did the yellow diamond shape, then the blue circle.  In the middle, the frosting got really thick, but most people just scraped some of it off any way.  I used a wide square paint brush to make the yellow and blue smoother.  It is still not flawless, but it is pretty good and tastes great.  To place the stars, I just looked at a picture on-line of the flag and I made the bigs ones with a small star tip and the smaller ones with a tiny round tip.
The words "Ordem e Progresso", which means Order and Progress, were written with a #1 round tip.  I tried it first with a #3 and it was too thick and I ran out of room.  After I scraped that off and put on the white again I tried it with the #1.  It all fit, but it is harder to make it look smooth with a smaller tip.  Next time maybe I'll try a #2.