Ahh Red Velvet cake. It’s an American legend and of late has been a ubiquitous addition to cupcake shops and cafés all around the world. But not all Red Velvet cakes are made equal. I did some work on finding the ideal Red Velvet cake about six years ago, a cochineal soaked task.
Red Velvet Cupcakes
So why is Red Velvet Cake red? Well, the answer is food colouring these days but my research suggests to me that originally, no colour was required. The basic cake is a light chocolate buttermilk cake, leavened with bicarbonate of soda mixed with a little vinegar. Back in the days before cocoa was Dutch-processed, the vinegar not only released carbon dioxide gas into the cake, making it light, but also reacted with the cocoa, turning it a red hue. Now, of course, Dutch-process cocoa is the standard, so food colouring is the only way to get the beautiful red coloured red velvet cake.
It’s fair to say that most recipes call for an obscene amount of colouring – 60mL is not uncommon. That is an awful lot of attention deficit disorder to be putting into a cake, and red food colouring can affect even adults. I’ve discovered that a tablespoon of liquid red colour is sufficient to make a pretty cake – and it doesn’t stain your entire digestive system.
Red Velvet Cake
You’ll see a few “healthy” red velvet cakes around, using beetroot to colour the batter. Back in the day, I found the heavy food colouring option pretty abhorrent and spent some time working on a beetroot recipe – I even tried making a natural beetroot juice dye. I’m sad to say, it’s not really that simple, and not least because the cake winds up tasting like beetroot, which has a distinctive earthy flavour. Beetroot chocolate cake is not that unpalatable, but it’s just not what real Red Velvet cake tastes like. I learned by experiment and some scientific literature that the red colour in beetroot is destroyed when it’s heated. The pigment’s red colour reduces by half after something like 20 minutes at baking temperatures. That’s fine if you have a whole piece of beetroot that you are baking – there’s lots of pigment in there – but a cake would have only 20% beetroot as a component. This means that if you are baking a cake for an hour, or even a cupcake for half an hour, your mix that looked pretty and red at the start goes brown. Sighs.
I did manage to make some yummy beetroot “red velvet cake” cupcakes in the end, but I also managed to break my juicer on a piece of beetroot (unbelievably messy), and at this point I basically gave up on beetroot and found a happier minimum food colouring to include in the cake.
Red enough!
My favourite red velvet cake recipe comes from New York’s Magnolia Bakery, and it’s reproduced below, with a couple of small modifications. It’s just superb… And the texture really is like velvet.
Red Velvet cake is always frosted, but there’s a bit of a debate about the “correct” frosting. Some claim that it’s cream cheese frosting. Others say it’s Butter Roux frosting.
My reading on the topic suggests that maybe Butter Roux frosting is the “proper” frosting, but more importantly, having tasted both, I much prefer Butter Roux frosting on grounds of flavour. It’s the perfect accompaniment to Red Velvet cake, smooth and lightly creamy. Cream cheese frosting has too much of a dominant tang a it smothers the delicate chocolate buttermilk flavour of the cake.
Red Velvet Christmas Tree Cupcakes with Butter Roux Frosting
Of course, Red Velvet cake is a pretty romantic looking cake. So, this being Valentine’s Day, here’s the recipe.
Red Velvet Cake
This makes a 23 cm round red velvet cake, or about 30 cupcakes. The recipe is easily divisible by three.
ingredients
3 1/3 cups flour
3 tbsp cocoa
1 1/2 tsp salt
185g butter
2 1/4 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 tbsp red food colouring
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 1/2 tsp white vinegar
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
mixing
Sift flour, cocoa and salt together and set aside.
Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Beat in colouring and vanilla.
Add half the flour mixture and mix until just combined and half the buttermilk, again mixing until just combined. Repeat with the remaining flour mix and buttermilk. Tip the baking soda into the vinegar and quickly tip the foaming mixture into the cake batter. Stir until combined but do not over mix.
For a 23cm cake, divide the mixture into thirds and spread into three 23 cm pans that have been lined with bake paper. Bake the layers at 180 degrees C for 30-35 minutes. Let cool completely in the pans.
For cupcakes, spoon mixture into cupcake pans lined with cupcake cases, greased with canola spray, and bake at the same temperature for 20-25 minutes. Let cool completely.
Frost the red velvet cake or cupcakes with butter roux frosting. A 23cm cake needs a double recipe of the frosting if you intend to decorate it with a generous coating and piped decorations. If you make 30 cupcakes you’ll need one and a half recipes of the frosting.
Red Velvet Cupcake
Enjoyxxx
