Why Everyone Begged Me To Bring This Simple Flag Cake To The Party

Last year I brought a flag cake to a Fourth of July rooftop barbecue. Earlier in the week I’d harbored fantasies about making an elaborate ice-cream cake, layered berry yogurt popsicles, or salads teetering on the edge of food-safety standards. But New York City, as it always seems to be in the first week of July, was cresting a week-plus of ever-increasing heat and humidity — a summit where it lingers for a few more airless days before finally releasing thunder and lightning and sinking the mercury back to something resembling temperate. What, me? No fan of NYC summers? Where would you get such an idea?

(This is also the time of year, every year, where I break my please-don’t-be-so-dull-as-to-complain-about-the-weather-Deb rule. Forgive me.) Anyway, the heat got the better of my ambitions and I decided to make a simple yellow sheet cake with cream-cheese frosting and a patriotic arrangement of berries that had, in fact, been imported from Baja. To me it was good — cute even — but nothing revolutionary, just something I’d seen kicked around magazines and TV for two decades. My friends, however — many of whom use their ovens for sweater storage and, gasp, do not spend their days ingesting food media — went absolutely ballistic over it. When strangers from other parties on the roof started taking some, my friends became protective and told me in no uncertain terms that I would never be welcome at a July 4th party again without it.

Of course I didn’t listen. Yesterday, ignoring this, I decided I must be the type of person who likes to attempt the insane Pinterest cakes. I am not. By the time I remembered this, my kitchen, my arms, all my towels, and my toddler were covered with food dye and the sticky residue of a red-white-and-let’s-never-talk-about-this-again disaster. Then I remembered this lovely, dead-simple cake that I should have been making instead. Did I mention it’s a quickie? It involves no piping bags, no strained warmed jam glazes, no pastry crusts and — most importantly — no food dye. I’d streamlined my standard yellow birthday cake into a virtually one-bowl, single-layer recipe, because surely we all have better things to do than scrub a sink full of dishes. The frosting is a dump-and-whip kind of thing and the berries just need rinsing and patting dry. Next year — and every year after that — I’m going to listen to my friends and make this flag cake. I think you should too.

If you have access to white raspberries, you can use them for the “white” stripes instead of powdered raspberries. You could also use them to make “stars” in the blueberry portion.

If you wash your berries — I tend to just look them over for dirt and occasionally give them a rinse — make sure they’re very dry. You’ll want the berries fully dry on the outside or the powdered sugar won’t stay on top. (That said, the slightly damp berries I used still kept a white appearance, with a little pink peeking through, so don’t drive yourself bonkers trying to get them perfect.)

I like to serve (and carry) this cake in the pan, rustic style, so I let it cool completely there. If you’d like to unmold it, let it cool on a rack for 15 minutes, flip it onto another rack, remove the parchment, and then flip it right-side up onto a serving platter. The frosting amount suggested covers just the top of the cake with a generous layer. If you’d like to frost the sides, use the same amount for a thinner coating, or increase the frosting by half to cover evenly.

Cake

• 2 sticks (1 cup, 1/2 pound or 225 g) unsalted butter, softened

• 2 cups (400 g) sugar

• 4 large eggs, at room temperature

• 2 teaspoons (10 ml) pure vanilla extract

• 4 cups (465 g) cake flour or 3 2/3 cups (460 g) all-purpose flour + 1/3 cup (45 g) cornstarch

• 2 teaspoons (10 g) baking powder

• 1 teaspoon (5 g) baking soda

• 1 teaspoon (6 g) table salt

• 2 cups buttermilk (475 ml), well shaken

Frosting

• 8-ounce (225 g) block cream cheese, at room temperature

• 1/2 cup (1 stick or 1/4 pound) butter, at room temperature

• 1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract

• 2 to 3 cups (240 to 360 g) powdered sugar

Decoration

• Powdered sugar

• 1 cup blueberries (1/2 pint, about 170 g), very dry

• 3 cups raspberries (1 1/2 pints, about 360 g), very dry

Make the cake

1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Butter a 9×13-inch baking pan and line the bottom with parchment; butter the parchment. (Nonstick spray works too.)

2. Beat the butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, at least 3 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl between additions. Add vanilla.

3. Sift or strain the flour, cornstarch (if using), baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add half the dry mixture to the mixing bowl and mix until just combined.

4. Add the buttermilk slowly, stirring to incorporate. The batter might look curdled — it will come together. Add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until combined.

5. Pour batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake until golden and a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. (Initial notes said 35 minutes, but some testers reported 45–50 minutes. Check at 35 minutes; if the center still looks batter-wet, check again in 10 minutes. Don’t remove until a tester comes out clean.)

6. Transfer the cake to a rack and let cool completely.

Make the frosting

1. Beat the cream cheese and butter until light and very fluffy, scraping the bowl so no cream cheese remains unmixed. Add vanilla.

2. Add the first cup of powdered sugar and beat until combined, then add the second cup. I prefer a less sweet cream-cheese frosting, so I often stop there. If the frosting seems too soft, add the third cup until you reach the desired sweetness and stiffness.

Assemble and decorate

1. If the cake domes and you want it flatter, level it with a serrated knife. Spread the frosting evenly over the top of the cooled cake.

2. Place powdered sugar in a sifter or fine-mesh strainer. Outline the short side blue rectangle of the flag with blueberries (the short side of the blue rectangle falls roughly at half the height of the short side of your cake; the long side will fall a little more than one-third the width). Dot a few blueberries inside the rectangle spaced apart and dust those with powdered sugar to create the “stars.” Fill the rest of the blue area with uncoated blueberries.

3. An American flag has 13 stripes beginning and ending with red. You won’t fit them all with normal-sized berries — nobody will care. Eyeball the width of your first row of raspberries and start your next row about 1/2–2/3 inch down. Continue the pattern of an empty row followed by a row of raspberries for the rest of the cake. Dust the raspberry rows with powdered sugar and fill the empty rows with uncoated raspberries.

4. Cover the pan with a lid or foil and refrigerate until needed.