No one knows who (or which baking-related company) created the recipe for the first flag cake. There is an ongoing battle of wills between Ina Garten and Martha Stewart over the claim. Calling it a feud feels too strong, and the history of this cake and these women is deeply intertwined. Regardless, Americans have been making some variation on the idea of a flag cake for generations. Long story short, the true origin of the flag cake is unknown and, as the Onion cleverly noted two decades ago, most of us don’t know why we make them anymore.
Let’s start with the Ina vs. Martha of it all, as their iterations of the flag cake have become the definitive model of the current era. Both have authored a white, vanilla sheet cake topped with stars and stripes made from blueberries, raspberries or sometimes strawberries, and buttercream frosting. In putting it together, both of them were thinking about featuring the fruits of the season at their peak, as long as you stick to strawberries for your Memorial Day flag cake and swap them for raspberries for the Fourth of July. The buttercream frosting is also smart, because it holds up to heat so well — it may sweat, but it won’t run like a normal icing when you set this cake outside at the cookout. And because most of us don’t want to stand over a hot oven during summer, a simple sheet cake is as minimal as a bake can get.
The feud over who created this cake is kind of a funny one. As far as I’ve been able to tell, Garten stakes a claim on it going back to her Barefoot Contessa shop in the Hamptons in the ‘90s. It made its public debut in her 2002 cookbook, The Barefoot Contessa Family Style, which happens to have a foreword written by Stewart. In a piece for Food52 that was at some point deleted (but the Wayback Machine never forgets), Sarah Jampel delved into the history, and when presented with this fact, Stewart responded with this terse quote: “I was definitely one of the first to make a flag cake — if not the first. We used the cake for a prototype issue of my magazine 25 years ago.” She’s referring to Martha Stewart Living, which made its debut in November 1990. Obviously, that issue was dedicated to holiday food and decor and, also hilariously, features an interview with Garten.
Stewart’s claim is unverifiable, and after watching her documentary, I have mixed feelings about her version of past events. A recipe on Stewart’s site notes that it appeared in a July 2001 issue of the magazine. However, Jampel provides enough detail, via her interview with Garten, about selling a limited number of cakes, only 50 each Fourth of July, out of her shop in the Hamptons, that Ravenous is willing to crown her the creator of the modern-day flag cake. Not that it matters, since both women are so intertwined with each other when it comes to this recipe. Garten’s association with the cake became cemented in lore after Taylor Swift made it and posted it to Instagram in 2014, and some websites started calling it Taylor Swift’s flag cake. For the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026, Stewart made an epic iteration of the cake (that must have cost a fortune in raspberries) to one-up Garten and Swift, more than a decade later. The internet is nothing if not a giant game of telephone with the lowest possible stakes.
This sheet cake is but one iteration of the flag cake, which has a long history in America. K.C. Hysmith, PhD, a food scholar, writer, and recipe developer, went very deep into the history on her blog and found that it goes much farther back than the jumbled idea most food websites present of a baking play by cake companies in the 1950s, although there was that, too. Going into the hellfire of god knows what academic portals, Hysmith dug up a mention of a flag cake in The Morning Call, a newspaper out of Paterson, New Jersey, from September 22, 1887, on the occasion of a society dinner. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us what an 1887 American flag cake was, and so we might assume they were so popular that the average reader would already know.
One of the most divisive parts of the flag cake is the near jingoism implied by the flag, in our current political environment where Americans no longer see eye-to-eye on what being patriotic means, or even what we’re actually supporting. This discourse may go back to the Iraq War of the mid-2000s. Or back to the Vietnam War in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Or to McCarthyism and the “second red scare” in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But Hysmith’s research traces flag cakes back to Washington's and Lincoln’s birthdays in 1907, on Flag Day (which happens on June 14 now), after naturalization ceremonies, and at Daughters of the American Revolution meetings on any random day (at least, until the organization deemed them unpatriotic for unspecified reasons in 1911). A photo she finds in the Detroit Free Press from 1932 describes them as being made using what looks to be a single-layer plain white butter cake and decorated with red, white, and blue icing — so they might have felt a lot like the flag cakes we know today.
Food52’s flag cake recipe is not complex, but it is detail-oriented and requires a lot of math, repetition, and steps. This particular recipe is not the sheet cake Swifties know and love, but a five-layer round cake where the flag itself is in the cake, with red, blue, and white layers. Making the Ina/Martha version of the cake is child’s play compared to what Food52 wants you to do to celebrate. I got so bored after making two layers that I took a break for days, stashing them in the fridge to keep. You have to make the batter five times over and use food dye on three batches. My red layers came out pink, and I decided to settle for it. This frosting will not keep on a sweaty July day, so save it for Veterans’ Day in November or Washington’s birthday in February, when you can safely eat cake inside. Then there’s the math of finding a 5-inch dish to measure your 9-inch cake and cut out the middle of your blue layer, so it only goes halfway outside. And you’ve got to cut a white layer too, and stick it in the middle. Now I’m assembling Barbie’s Dream Flag Cake.
“It looks super-complicated, but it’s actually just a matter of following the instructions,” the recipe developer said in the description. No, it is super complicated. Or maybe I’m just a lazy baker. Either way, Ina and/or Martha knew what they were doing when developing the sheet cake version of this treat. If you’re serving it for the Fourth of July, then choose a recipe that gives you time to hang out and have a holiday yourself.
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