Recipe Junction

Our Favorite Recipes'

Red Velvet Cake

Hot rich recipe has cakes turning red red all over velvet cake is leaving hearts aflutter

It's a cake that can stop traffic. The layers vary from a fluorescent pink to a ruddy mahogany. The hue, often enhanced by buckets of red food coloring, becomes even more eye-catching set against clouds of snowy icing, like a slash of glossy lipstick framed by platinum blond curls.

Even the name has a vampy allure: red velvet.

“It's the Dolly Parton of cakes: a little bit tacky, but you love her,” said Angie Mosier, a food writer in Atlanta and a board member of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

But no matter how you slice it – or bake it – red velvet cake is all the rage, appearing in food magazines and in bakeries all over the country.

Some bakers and food historians attribute the cake's rise in popularity to its role in the 1989 film “Steel Magnolias,” where it appeared in the shape of an armadillo, with gray icing. The cake, if not the armadillo, had staying power.

The cake scored a public-relations coup of sorts when the singer Jessica Simpson served a towering hexagonal version at her wedding to Nick Lachey in 2002. Her cake was made by Sam Godfrey, owner of the bakery Perfect Endings in Napa, who said he included a red velvet sample among the cakes he gave Simpson “because she's from Texas.” He wasn't prepared for her reaction.

“When she chose it, I was dumbstruck,” he said. “Then she talked about it all over television.”

Locally, red velvet cupcakes with white chocolate-cream cheese frosting are the hottest seller at Elizabethan Desserts, a bakery in Encinitas.

“It's very trendy,” noted the bakery's owner, Elizabeth Harris. “People are curious about red velvet. They see it on TV or they hear about it and read about it, and they want to know what flavor it is.”

But is this American oddity more than just a pretty face? The best red velvet cakes are moist and tender, not too sweet. The layers are in harmony with an alluringly rich fluff of soft cream-cheese or butter-cream icing, not a gummy or sugary plaster.

Though the consensus is that red velvet, like many layer cakes, is from the South, it is certainly not in every cookbook about Southern food. No definitive information exists on exactly where it came from, how it should be made or why it is red. In fact, red velvet cake has produced almost as many theories and controversies as recipes.

One early story links it to New York. In their new “Waldorf-Astoria Cookbook” (Bulfinch Press, 2006), John Doherty and John Harrisson say that the cake, which they call a Southern dessert, became a signature at the hotel in the 1920s.

It is also the subject of an urban legend: A woman at the Waldorf was supposedly so taken with it that she asked for the recipe – for which she was charged $100 or more. In revenge, she passed the recipe along to everyone she knew. The tale, like a similar one about a cookie recipe from Neiman Marcus, has been debunked.

Doherty, the Waldorf's executive chef, said the hotel still gets many requests for red velvet, so it is offered on the room-service menu and in Oscar's American Brasserie.

“It's not my favorite cake,” he said. “I can't bear the thought of all that food coloring.” He uses beets to color his version.

Perfect Endings in Napa bakes the excellent red velvet cake that Williams-Sonoma features in its catalog and online. Godfrey said he uses a recipe he learned to bake with his grandmother, a native of Little Rock, Ark.

“But for the bakery, I couldn't bring myself to offer a cake using red food coloring,” he said. “I tried cherries and beets, but it wasn't right. Then I decided to honor my grandmother, so I went ahead with the food coloring.”

At Elizabethen Desserts in Encinitas, Harris said she has found a way to lighten up on the food coloring: “I use a combination of beets and a little food coloring.”

Carl S. Redding, who serves red velvet cake at Amy Ruth's, his restaurant in Harlem, said that many places do not make it properly. “There are people who just dump red food coloring into a yellow cake batter, but it has to have cocoa,” he said.

Craig Claiborne, a Mississippi native who was a food editor for The New York Times, included a red velvet recipe with no cocoa in “Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking” (Times Books, 1987). But to most authorities, at least some cocoa is essential.

Combined with other traditional layer-cake ingredients, cocoa takes on a red tinge. As Harold McGee, the author of two books on the science of cooking, explained, cocoa contains anthocyanin, a red pigment found in foods such as red cabbage. “When you cook foods like this with acid, the more red these pigments look,” he said. “Red cabbage stays redder and will not turn blue if there is vinegar in the cooking water.”

In cakes, cocoa is often combined with an acid like buttermilk or vinegar, both of which activate baking soda, a common leavening. The reddish tint produced by this reaction might explain why some chocolate cakes are called devil's food, a theory that was held by James Beard. Home bakers in the South may have decided to exaggerate cocoa's natural hue with food coloring and – Eureka! – they had red velvet.

Another theory is that home cooks started adding red food coloring after Dutch process cocoa became widely used. (The Dutch process makes cocoa easier to dissolve by adding an alkalizing agent like potassium carbonate, decreasing the acidity in the batter and making the redness disappear.)

Most recipes for red velvet cake call for cocoa in amounts ranging from an insignificant teaspoon to a serious half-cup. The more cocoa in the cake, the more red food coloring is needed to override the brown. But home bakers should be aware that using a lot of red food coloring carries the risk of thoroughly spattering the kitchen. And there is a limit to how much cocoa can be used effectively.

“The cake is neither chocolate nor vanilla,” said Lisa Hall, an owner of Kitchenette, a cafe and bakery that makes red velvet cakes and cupcakes at its locations in Manhattan. “It's Southern and moist and comfort food. People love it, and I don't understand why.”

Red Velvet Cake

Makes 12 servings

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• Pinch salt
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 tablespoon white vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tablespoons natural cocoa powder
• 2 tablespoons red food coloring
• 12 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

FROSTING

• 16 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• 4 cups confectioners' sugar
• 16 ounces cream cheese, cut into 8 pieces, softened
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• Pinch salt

For the cake: Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans. Whisk flour, baking soda and salt in medium bowl. Whisk buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla and eggs in large measuring cup. Mix cocoa with food coloring in small bowl until a smooth paste forms.

With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat butter and sugar together until fluffy, about 2 minutes, scraping down bowl as necessary. Add one-third of flour mixture and beat on medium-low speed until just incorporated, about 30 seconds. Add half of buttermilk mixture and beat on low speed until combined, about 30 seconds. Scrape down bowl as necessary and repeat with half of remaining flour mixture, remaining buttermilk mixture, and finally remaining flour mixture. Scrape down bowl, add cocoa mixture, and beat on medium speed until completely incorporated, about 30 seconds.

Using a rubber spatula, give the batter a final stir. Scrape into prepared pans and bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Cool cakes in pans 10 minutes, then turn out onto rack to cool completely, at least 30 minutes.

For the frosting: With electric mixer, beat butter and sugar on medium-high speed until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add cream cheese, one piece at a time, and beat until incorporated, about 30 seconds. Beat in vanilla and salt. Refrigerate until ready to use.

When cakes are cooled, spread about 2 cups frosting on one cake layer. Top with second cake layer and spread top and sides of cake with remaining frosting. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve, up to 3 days.

(From Cook's Country 2006 (Cook's Country Magazine).)

Prior | Submit your recipe | Next

Add to Your Social Bookmarks: Del.icio.us Digg Furl Reddit Simpy Spurl Y! MyWeb - StumbleUpon