Susan's Homeschool Blog

Today I’m going to show you how to make a flag cake. These cakes are super easy to make because they are rectangular-shaped. All you need to do is tint icing the correct colors of the flag, and arrange the top of the cake to look like a country’s flag.

Why would you want to decorate a cake as a specific flag? If someone is British, and it’s his birthday, and he happens to be living in the United States, you can make a flag of the United Kingdom to make him smile.

I baked a Canadian birthday cake for my Canadian mother. I made a Guatemalan cake for my dad, who was a missionary in Guatemala for 20 years. You can make a cake with Israel’s flag for Christians who love Israel.

You can also study a certain country with your children, and make a flag cake for that country, especially if you are homeschooling.

How to Make a Flag Cake (Basic Instructions)

1. First you want to bake a cake in the shape of a rectangle. Cool the cake.
2. Next you will want to grab a tub of vanilla icing. If there are two colors in the flag, you will want to divide the icing into two bowls. Some flags have two thirds of one color, and one third of another color. In this case, you will want to place two thirds of the icing in one bowl, and one third in another. Use food coloring to get to the desired shade of color.
3. Decorate the top of the cake to look as close as possible to the real flag.

How to Make a Greek Flag Cake

1. Grab two tubs of vanilla icing. Ice the Greek flag cake completely white.
2. Scoop the second tub of icing into a bowl, and place drops of blue food coloring into it. Stir into the desired shade of blue.
3. In the upper left corner, draw a box with blue icing. I scooped the blue icing into a Ziplock bag with the corner cut off. Then I colored four small squares in each corner of that square, with the result of a white cross left in that corner.
4. Cut the hole larger now in the corner of the bag. Draw the thick blue lines across the remainder of the flag.

How to Make an Ethiopian Flag Cake

1. Divide the icing into three bowls. Tint one bowl green, one bowl yellow, and one bowl red.
2. Frost the cake in thirds. The top is green, the middle is yellow, the bottom is red.

How to Make a Guatemalan Flag Cake

1. I used two tubs of icing for this one. The first tub I tinted blue. I used this to frost the two sides of the cake.
2. The second tub of frosting, I left white. I frosted the middle of the cake. I actually frosted the middle first, before frosting the two blue sides, because it’s easier to put blue on top of white than to put white on top of blue, if you make a mistake.
3. With the remainder of the white frosting, I divided it into three bowls: green, yellow, and brown. I might have used chocolate frosting from a different project for the brown, because it looks too perfect to have been tinted with dye. By the way, when you are dying darker colors, always start with chocolate frosting because then you will need less dye.
4. Put the green frosting in a Ziplock bag and snip off one corner. Make a U-shape to represent the leaves, and draw the quetzal bird in the middle. You could also use candy leaves if you can find them at a cake supply store. This would look better than the version I made.
5. The yellow is the paper, and the brown outlines the paper that the bird is holding in the center of the flag. The other brown strokes are branches. Use Ziplock bags and snip off a tiny hole in each end for these two colors.

How to Make a Canadian Flag Cake

1. Once again, I used two tubs of icing, even though I probably could have gotten away with one. I iced the cake white first.
2. I dyed the other icing red, and used that on the two sides.
3. I grabbed my maple leaf cookie cutter, and I pressed it into the middle of the cake. This gave me the outline I needed to fill in the maple leaf with red icing.

Hopefully now you know how to make a flag cake. Enjoy your creations!

If you want more hands-on ideas for teaching geography, grab Living Geography: Travel the World from your Living Room.