Red Velvet

This cake was for my Aunty’s birthday. I didn’t want to do the usual chocolate cake so I stepped out of the box a little and did a Red Velvet cake.
I did a bit of research on line and found tones of recipes and blogs of Red Velvet. A lot of people aren’t impressed with the cake, its main charm being it’s colour not it’s flavour. I took this into consideration when I choose the recipe with the most cocoa and then beefed up the cocoa content to enhance the chocolate flavour.
I was aware of some peoples aversion to the cake because of the food colouring required but I didn’t think this would hurt, the kids didn’t show any side effects, and they all ate a lot of cake!
The cream cheese icing was a nice accompaniment to the cake, though I wonder what it would have been like with a whipped ganache, quite tasty I think.
It was very necessary to do a 'crumb coating' on this cake, a crumb coating is a very thin layer of frosting spread over the cake and refridgerated, to stop crumbs from getting in the frosting.

When icing a red cake with white icing it would be plain dumb not to do a crumb coat. ;)

The finnished cake looked fantastic, the cake was moist and soft, slightly chocolately, very yummy. The cream cheese icing was sweeter than I thought it would be, but still had the tang of the cheese and complemented the cake nicely, but flavour and colour wise.

Red Velvet Cake

INGREDIENTS:

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

3½ cups cake flour or 3 ½ cups plain flour minus 7 tbs

½ cup unsweetened cocoa + 1 tbs1

½ teaspoons salt

2 cups canola oil

2¼ cups granulated sugar

3 large eggs

6 tablespoons (3 ounces) red food colouring

1½ teaspoons vanilla

1¼ cup buttermilk

2 teaspoons baking soda

2½ teaspoons white vinegar

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Place teaspoon of butter in each of 3 round 22cm layer cake pans and place pans in oven for a few minutes until butter melts. Remove pans from oven, brush interior bottom and sides of each with butter and line bottoms with parchment.

2. Whisk cake flour, cocoa and salt in a bowl.

3. Place oil and sugar in bowl of an electric mixer and beat at medium speed until well-blended. Beat in eggs one at a time. With machine on low, very slowly add red food colouring. (Take care: it may splash.) Add vanilla. Add flour mixture alternately with buttermilk in two batches. Scrape down bowl and beat just long enough to combine.

4. Place baking soda in a small dish, stir in vinegar and add to batter with machine running. Beat for 10 seconds.

5. Divide batter among pans, place in oven and bake until a cake tester comes out clean, 40 to 45 minutes. Let cool in pans 20 minutes. Then remove from pans, flip layers over and peel off parchment. Cool completely before frosting.

Cream cheese icing
(225g) cream cheese, softened
(110g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
(450g) confectioner's sugar, sifted)
Beat the cream cheese with the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and beat until very smooth.

Spread evenly on the cake.