Red, White, and Blue(berry)

Celebrate our country's independence with a good ol' fashioned BBQ with friends and family! The BBQ part is easy...steak, chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, fish, veggies, whatever you want. A BBQ just isn't a BBQ without a few staple dishes: green salad, watermelon, potato salad, chips and dips. But the desserts are what it's all about! Have fun making easy themed desserts to share with your friends and family.

American Flag Cake
One of the easiest themed desserts to create is to bake a cake in a 9x13 pan and frost it with white icing. Top the left corner with a square space filled with blueberries. Then, create rows of sliced strawberries to create the stripes on the American flag. Be sure to leave white space between the strawberry rows to account for the white stripes. If you prefer, you can bake a shortcake instead of a traditional cake and "ice" it with whipped cream instead of white icing.

Star/Flag Cookies
Sugar cookies are a perennial favorite for many people, but they're particularly popular with children. Every child I've known loves to help make sugar cookies. If you have children around, bake a huge batch of sugar cookies and show them how to make a star on the round cookies and flags on the rectangular cookies for some Independence Day fun! Individual creativity is the limit here!

Lemon Bar Flags
Bake a batch of lemon bars and dust with sifted powdered sugar. Cut into individual, rectangular serving sizes and stripe with red decorative icing and use blueberries for the stars. (Lemon/blueberry go really well together- yum!)

Red, White, and Blue Popsicles
Pick up some popsicle molds and wooden popsicle sticks to get this quicky dessert started. Pour a red juice or soda of choice into the mold (fill about 1/4 of the way), cover with plastic wrap or foil and insert the wooden popsicle stick. Freeze about an hour or until solid. Remove plastic or foil cover and pour in a clear/white juice or soda of choice, recover molds and freeze for about an hour or until solid. Repeat with a blue juice or soda of choice. In the end, you'll have cute flag colored popsicles. For variation, try alternating juice with soda or vice versa.

Chocolate Cupcake American Flag
Bake chocolate cupcakes and frost with red, white, or blue frosting. For this project, you'll be creating a flag with all of the cupcakes instead of individually decorating each one. You can alter the number of cupcakes based on the amount you need, but I'd suggest that you frost as follows:

9 blue cupcakes (embellish with white stars if you'd like)
42 red cupcakes
33 white cupcakes
84 cupcakes (total)

With this, on a rectangular platter create a square section of blue cupcakes in the upper left corner.  The first row that extends from the blue section should be a red row of 9 cupcakes. The second row that extends from the blue will be 9 white cupcakes and the third row will extend another row of 9 red cupcakes. After that section is filled in, start immediately below the blue section and create a row of 12 white cupcakes. Alternate with the red and white, ending on a red row. When it's complete, you'll have a rectangle that's 7 cupcakes by 12 cupcakes (or 84 square cupcakes).

Have a happy and safe 4th of July! Eat well!!!

Happy Searching/Shopping,
Payton