Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Place your self-rising flour, cake flour, and sugar in the bowl of your mixer. Mix them together for a minute or two until they are well combined.

Cut your butter into tablespoon pieces. Slowly add your butter into the flour mixture one piece at a time continue mixing until you have reached the texture of sand.

Pour half of your milk into the flour mixture and mix just until the milk is incorporated. Use your rubber spatula to scrape down the sides of your bowl. Add your remaining milk and the vanilla to your batter and mix until combined.

Slowly add in one egg at a time to the cake batter, making sure each egg is incorporated before adding the next egg.

Once your batter is made, pour vanilla cake mix into one 8 inch round cake pan and the 6 inch cake pan. Use food coloring to color the 6 inch vanilla cake mix red.

Divide the remaining cake batter in to 2 bowls. Color one blue with food coloring and the other red with red food coloring.

Bake for 35-40 minutes until a toothpick comes clean when you stick it in the cake.

Remove cakes from the oven and allow them to cool completely. While the cake is cooking make the buttercream frosting.

Place butter and shortening together in the bowl of your mixer. On medium speed mix them together until it is all creamed together.

Turn the mixer to the lowest setting and slowly add the powdered sugar.

Once all the powdered sugar has been added and mixed well add the vanilla extract and hot water(if you need to thin out the buttercream frosting)

Turn the mixer to medium-high speed and continue mixing until the frosting is light and fluffy.

Cut the red cakes and white cake in half lengthwise so you end up with six layers of cake.

Cut out a 4-inch circle out of parchment paper. Use this as a template to cut one of the 6-inch red cake layers into a 4-inch circle. Used this same template to cut out a 4-inch  white cake. Then cut out a blue 4-inch circle but save the outside ring, not the inside 4-inch circle

Place one of the 8-inch red cake layers on your cake plate and add a layer of frosting then sandwich a white layer of cake on top of the frosting.

Add another layer of frosting on top of the white cake and place the red layer of 8-inch cake on top of that. Spread a layer of frosting on top of the red cake.

Insert the 4-inch white cake into the middle of the blue cake. Top the white cake with the 4-inch red.

Frosty outside of the cake and then design as you would like.