July 4th is just around the corner and we’re sharing a festive and patriotic cake design with colorful chocolate panels and fireworks!

I love that these colorful chocolate candy coating panels look so unique and festive but require no special cake tools. It’s truly a cake design that is achievable for all skill levels of cake decorating.We hope that you enjoy this simple Fourth of July cake video. Don’t miss the additional details and materials listed below!

Materials:

In today’s cake tutorial, we are decorating an 8 inch cake that has been frosted in our Fluffy Vanilla Buttercream. Pick your cake and frosting of choice!

Chocolate candy coating panels can be made with bark coating, candy melts, or your candy coating brand of choice. We used Wilton pre-colored candy melts for convenience.

Candy Melts/Candy Coating:  1/2 bag (approx 6 oz) White Candy Melts, 1/2 bag Royal Blue Candy Melts, 2 bags (24 oz) Red Candy Melts.

Spatula or Bench Scraper

Waxed Paper

Disposable Piping Bags for piping fireworks. (We snipped off the ends rather than using piping tips.)

Lollipop Sticks for toppers

White fondant

small star cutter (You could also just pipe small white dots on the blue panels for “stars”!)

Misc.: Sharp Knife, Cookie sheet or cake cardboard

Notes:

After spreading the chocolate, we allowed it to cool on the countertop for several minutes until the chocolate had taken on a matte finish and could be sliced. We then refrigerated until firm. You could also freeze.

Our panels were approximately 5 1/2 inches in length.

*Alternate design: I opted to go with a smooth look for my red and white panels. However, if you’d rather, you can just make solid red panels and then pipe on your white lines of chocolate afterwards. The white stripes will be raised but would still look good!

We used a little buttercream as our “glue” for the panels.

We hope that you enjoyed this fun little July 4th Cake Tutorial! Make sure to check out our full collection of favorite cake and frosting recipes in our Recipes Section! Or, check out even more Free Cake Tutorials in our Free Tutorials section! We’d love to have you!