Rose Red Velvet Cake 8/26/10

My boss called me in to her office on Wednesday afternoon and posed the question to me, "Have you ever made a red velvet cake?"  Being an essentially truthful person, I replied that I had done in the past.  She then requested that I make one for an office celebration scheduled for the upcoming Friday.  Like the mildly psychotic baker that I am, I eagerly agreed.  Thus, our first cake is the Rose Red Velvet Cake from Rose's Heavenly Cakes.




Rose's Heavenly Cakes is the best baking book that I've ever owned.  The instructions are clear and precise, the measurements for almost all ingredients are given both by volume and by weight, the pictures are beautiful, and every single one of the cakes I've made from it has turned out amazing.  The Rose Red Velvet Cake (p. 83) is no exception.  Rose's version is a single-layer cake, but I decided to double it and go for two layers so that everyone in our office could get a piece without being too stingy.


The first step in baking for me is always to copy the recipe down onto index cards or slips of notepaper. (Click the image for a larger view.)

I'm kind of grossed out by the idea of stains on my recipe books, and this also forces me to read the entire recipe and parse it down to what I need to remember.  Otherwise, I'm sure I would accidentally skip steps and end up with a giant pile of crappy cake.  Or accidentally use a tablespoon of baking soda instead of a teaspoon (This is not an exaggeration, I have done this in the past).


The next step is to get everything to room temperature.  This is what my sink looks like a few hours before baking:



The cake flour is in the sink because I keep it in the freezer.  I learned my lesson the hard way when I had to throw out an unopened, super-expensive bag of specialty flour because of weevils.  Which is disgusting.  Now, I freeze all of my flour to kill anything and then store it in airtight containers.  The cake flour doesn't have it's own container, so I just keep it in the freezer and take it out the morning that I need to use it.

Next comes pan prep.  I'll write about this in a future post since this one is getting long already and it's a step that I obsess about just a bit.



And here are all the ingredients, nicely laid out:



My butter got too soft and I had to put it back in the fridge for a few minutes.  That dent in the side of the butter in the picture is from where I picked it up like a flippin' idiot and it got all smushed.



From what I understand from reading Bruce Campbell's autobiography, fake blood in the movies is red food coloring, water, and corn syrup.  This sounds sticky and gross.  But if there is ever a need for fake menses for a movie, the perfect mixture would consist of three egg whites and a bottle of red food coloring.  Please lord, let that movie not exist ever.  This is some macabre shit.


Dry ingredients + buttermilk:



Dry ingredients + buttermilk + my horrible hand mixer:



"But Kailin," you say, "Isn't it supposed to be RED?"  Yes.  Yes it is.  Now stop talking in bold font.  It's creeping me out.



There!  Red enough for you?  Before adding the gross red mixture, the batter was pretty thick and dry, but after adding it, the batter was a lot runnier than I would usually like in a cake.  But in this case it was perfect.

After a prolonged tour of the oven, the cake comes out:



At this point, it was late and my shoulders were hurting so I forgot to take pictures of the construction of the white chocolate frosting.  Here is the finished product:



Of course, I doubled everything to make two layers of cake and I filled the layers with half of the doubled recipe of frosting.  The other half of the frosting got slapped on top and then I used a knife to make some goofy swirls in the top.  I am very bad with frosting.  Here is the final product after being left in the refrigerator all evening:



As soon as I put the second layer on top of the first, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake.  It looks absolutely horrible.  Fortunately, either everyone in my office was too polite to say anything or they simply didn't notice how bad it looked.  As a single-layer cake, this can look classy, but here it looks gross.  Perhaps I'm just being an obsessive weirdo, but I was really upset by the time finished and went to bed.

To be honest, this isn't my favorite cake in the book.  It's good, but I just don't think that red velvet cake is my thing.  The flavors are very well balanced and it's not too sweet, which is a complaint that I often have about baked goods.  Unfortunately, I always get a headache when I have this cake, which may be triggered by the red food coloring.  So it's not one I pull out unless it is requested.

So that's the genesis of the Rose Red Velvet Cake.  Hopefully the next cake will be a little more aesthetically pleasing.