Freedom Cake

Last year I saw a photo of a flag cake that I could not get out of my head. It appealed to me as a baker and a graphic designer (and an American darnit!). I patiently waited until Independence Day to give it a try. The results were pretty good. Visually, I could not have been more pleased. But if I make it again, I will be sure to make a cake I really like, with frosting that compliments it perfectly. The white cake I made was pretty good, thanks to the addition of almond extract. But the confectioner's sugar vanilla frosting was wayyyyy too sweet for anyone but a child.

Notes for the future: I might want to make red velvet for the red layers, and try and figure out what other flavor would go well with that.
I wanted to make buttercream frosting but could not find cream of tartar in time. I now have it in the pantry, I must make a batch to see if it would work. Another idea is cream cheese frosting.
Freezing the cake layers; I made the cake 10 days in advance, wrapped them individually in plastic, then tin foil and froze them. I moved them from freezer to refrigerator the night before assembly. Night of assembly, I set them on the counter for a little bit, made frosting, cut all the layers and assembled and frosted the cake. I kept the finished cake in the refrigerator overnight. The cake itself was very moist, and quite dense.
One more thing - I need to be sure that the cake pan fits into the cooler or vehicle that I will use to get the cake to its final destination. In this case, the goal was to bring it along on our annual camping trip to Bishop, a 4.5 hour drive away and 20 degrees warmer. Near snaffu when I attempted to shove the cake box into one of the coolers to find it was about one-half of an inch too long. Thankfully, I had a soft cooler I was able to strong-arm the cake into. Just lucky we had enough room in the car for the additional cooler!