Firecracker Cake

For the cake you will need:

1 box Super Moist Cake Mix (white or vanilla)

Required ingredients for cake mix (eggs/oil/water)

Red Food Gel (coloring)

Blue Food Gel (coloring)

Sprinkles of choice (I actually changed my mind at the last minute and used jimmies instead)

Bundt pan of choice

Pam & Flour or Wilton's Cake Release

 Step 1: Mix cake batter according to package & preheat oven

Step 2: Recruit some help :)

Separate batter equally into 3 bowls. Add red coloring to one bowl and mix well. Add blue coloring to another bowl and mix well. Leave the 3rd bowl of batter as is.

Step 3: Grease your bundt pan well with Pam + flour (or cake release) and pour your red batter in first. Then pour your white batter in on top of the red.

Followed by the blue batter.

Step 4: Bake according to box (*note: I never bake the full length of time. I baked this one for 30 minutes vs. the minimum 38 min. since my skewer came out clean at that point)

Step 5: Allow to cook in the pan completely! (I had a previous failure on St. Patrick's Day when I tried dumping the cake out too soon and it stuck to the pan and just crumbled apart). I seriously left this on the counter in the pan and went to lunch and came back this time.

Step 6: Take the platter you want to serve the cake on and put it upside down on top of the exposed cake above. Then carefully hold the platter and the bottom of the bundt pan and flip the two over together to get your cake onto the center of the platter gently :) The cake should just "slide" out!!

For the icing you will need:

Homemade Buttercream Recipe (4c powdered sugar, 1 stick butter, 1/2c Crisco, 1 tsp vanilla, 2 Tbsp milk)

Red food gel (coloring)

Blue food gel (coloring)

3 sandwich ziplocks or piping bags

Step 7: Make a batch of buttercream icing & put 1/3 of it into a sandwich size ziplock for piping. *note: to hold ziplock open while filling it with icing, place it into a cup and fold edges over the rim of the cup

Step 8: Put another 1/3 of icing into a bowl and set aside for a moment. Then to the remaining last 1/3 of icing in the mixer, add red coloring and mix well. 

Step 9: Put the red icing into a separate ziplock. Then add blue coloring the icing in the bowl and mix well. Put blue icing into a separate ziplock. 

Step 10: Cut a corner off each icing bag with scissors. Drizzle the icing over the cake & add sprinkles!

Step 11: Cut & Enjoy!!