Red velvet cake is a cake with either a dark red, bright red or red-brown color. It is traditionally prepared as a layer cake topped with cream cheese or cooked roux icing.
The main cake ingredients are flour, butter, buttercream, and sugar. The red color comes from either beets or food coloring.These ingredients combine to create a red velvet cake.
James Beard's reference, American Cookery (1972), describes three red velvet cakes varying in the amounts of shortening, butter, and vegetable oil. All used red food coloring, but the reaction of acidic vinegar and buttermilk tends to better reveal the red anthocyanin in cocoa and keeps the cake moist, light, and fluffy. This natural tinting may have been the source for the name "red velvet", as well as "Devil's food" and similar names for chocolate cakes.
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| Red Velvet Cupcakes |
Red velvet cupcakes recipe:
Ingredients:
- 350g (2 1/3 cups) plain flour
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 250ml (1 cup) buttermilk
- 315g (1 1/2 cups) caster sugar
- 2 eggs
- 185ml (3/4 cup) vegetable oil
- 3 teaspoons red food colouring
- 2 teaspoons white vinegar
- Dollar Sweets Fairy Fives sprinkles, to decorate frosting
- 100g butter, at room temperature
- 250g pkt cream cheese, at room temperature
- 195g (1 1/4 cups) pure icing sugar, sifted
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Method, Step by Step:
Step 1
Preheat oven to 180°C. Line eighteen 80ml (1/3-cup) capacity muffin pans with paper cases. Sift the flour, cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder into a large bowl. Stir in the sugar.
Step 2
Whisk the buttermilk, oil, eggs, food colouring and vinegar in a jug until combined. Make a well in the centre of the flour mixture. Add the buttermilk mixture and stir until just combined.
Step 3
Divide the mixture among the prepared pans. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centres comes out clean. Transfer the cupcakes to a wire rack to cool completely.
Step 4
To make the cream cheese frosting, use an electric beater to beat the cream cheese, butter, icing sugar and vanilla in a bowl until smooth.
Step 5
Pipe the icing over the cupcakes and top with the sprinkles.
In recent years, red velvet cake and red velvet cupcakes have become increasingly popular in the US and many European countries. A resurgence in the popularity of this cake is attributed by some to the film Steel Magnolias (1989), which included a red velvet groom's cake made in the shape of an armadillo. Magnolia Bakery in Manhattan, having served it since its opening in 1996, certainly helped to popularize the cake, as did restaurants known for their Southern cooking like Amy Ruth's in Harlem,[3] which opened in 1998. In 2000, Cake Man Raven opened one of the first bakeries devoted to the cake in Brooklyn.