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Red Velvet Cake

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Red Velvet Cake

My son LOVES red velvet cake and asked for his birthday cake to be red velvet.  As a person who is rather opposed to artificial flavors and colors, red velvet cake presents a conundrum.  It’s a really good cake with my favorite cream cheese icing.  But… the dye.   It’s a horrible ingredient.  The birthday boy picks his cake, of course, but can I make it without the dye?  Red velvet red just isn’t a natural color.  All over the internet there were recipes with beets or pomegranate used in place of the dye.  Neither one is really going to wow my son.  However, I thought beets might add some moisture and deep color, so maybe that was a better choice if it needed to be a really red cake.

I looked for red velvet recipes in my older cookbooks and found plenty of “velvet” cakes, but nothing specifically “red”.  Across the internet, there are various origin stories for the red velvet cake.  One is that it became popular when Adam’s Extract included a recipe for the “red” velvet cake in order to promote the sale of various extracts and dyes.  The original recipe from Adam’s Extract can be found here.  If I’m hesitant about using red dye, the artificial butter extract and vegetable shortening wasn’t too appealing in this recipe.  Other stories said the “red” was really more of a reddish brown and only recently came to mean food color red.  So, the old cookbooks were of little help, because my son wanted “red” red velvet cake.

I came across several recipes for red velvet that used beets and had no artificial ingredients, which was exactly what I was looking for!  My son gave his ok to use beets for the coloring, but I had to guarantee that if it was terrible I would make a “regular” red velvet cake.  A money back guarantee, if you will.

I found a very simple recipe from Domino Sugar and tweaked it ever so slightly.   The cake came out rich and extremely moist.  It’s a deep red and simply divine.

Red Velvet Cake
Makes:  two 9 inch layers or 24 cupcakes
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 35 minutes

1 ¼ cup – Granulated Sugar (Domino recommends Domino’s)
¾ cup – (1 ½ sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3 – large eggs
1 ¾ cup – cake flour or all purpose flour
¾ cup – unsweetened cocoa powder (NOT dutch processed)
1 ½ tsp. – baking powder
½ tsp. – baking soda
1 tsp. – salt
1 cup – buttermilk
1 tsp. – white vinegar
2 tsp. – vanilla extract
2 cups pureed roasted beets or canned beets*

*Beets: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Wash 6 medium beets and trim off the tops. Roast beets for 75-90 minutes until soft. Cool and then remove outer skin. Puree in food processor until completely smooth. I can’t speak to how well this recipe works with drained, canned beets that are pureed. I’ve only used fresh roasted beets.

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Grease two 9-inch cake pans with butter and coat with flour. If you would prefer to make cupcakes, line two cupcake tins with paper cups and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter until fluffy and lightened. Add each egg, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

In a medium bowl, sift flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

In another medium bowl, combine buttermilk, vinegar, and vanilla. Whisk to blend well. Fold pureed beets into buttermilk mixture.

Add sifted dry ingredients and buttermilk-beet mixture alternately to creamed butter, scraping down the sides of the bowl and mixing well after each addition. Pour into prepared cake pans or cupcake tins. (Fill cupcake tins 2/3 to 3/4 full.)

Bake about 25 minutes (cupcakes) to 30 minutes (cake layers), or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cupcake or cake comes out clean.

Remove from oven and allow to cool completely before frosting with Cream Cheese Frosting, without the cocoa powder!!

Red Velvet Cake Red Velvet Cake

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Red Velvet Cake Red Velvet Cake

Strawberry Shortcake

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I have a love/hate relationship with Strawberry Shortcake.  I generally have a “no fruit”  dessert policy, save apple and pumpkin pie.    Why waste my few precious carb calories on a dessert with no chocolate?  Seems like madness, truly.

The other thing is, well, I thought shortcake sort of sucked.  It’s either made with that yellow spongy crap that I now realize is the yellow spongy cake that makes up a Twinkie.  Well played, Hostess.  Tell people that all they have to do is spray whipped cream into these yellow dimpled cake shells and top with strawberries.  Voilà!  Strawberry “shortcake”!  Or, it’s made with cut up store bought Angel Food Cake.  Ugh.

A few years ago I had a berry shortcake at a small restaurant in Annapolis called “O’Leary’s”.  Honestly, the other desserts looked terrible.  “Terrible” being defined as a dessert “containing chocolate that was contaminated with fruit”.   Is there a rule that raspberries must be in a chocolate dessert?  Anyway, it was an order of last resort.   My low expectations were exceeded when a lovely confection was placed in front of me.  A tender, yet crispy biscuit split and oozing thick whipped cream topped with berries of all colors.  What was this?  Where was the Angel Food or bland yellow cake?  Instead, I got an actual “shortcake” and it was amazing.  Despite it being really good, I had no desire at the time to make it because of the whole lack of chocolate thing.

So, I’m reading the Wall Street Journal the other day and come across an article about how the French are up in arms about whether an establishment can be called a “restaurant” when it doesn’t actually cook all of the food served.  Some of the food, gasp, is frozen and prepared off site.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323398204578488990597549094.html0597549094.html

This article brought me back to my shortcake experience, and other brushes with mass produced food being used in a “restaurant”.  The “semi-homemade” take on strawberry shortcake is far removed from the real dessert.  The same could be said for dry chocolate cake or waxy “New York Style” cheesecake.  Most desserts at restaurants are so lackluster.  They pretty much taste like they came from Costco, Restaurant Depot, or some other mass production facility.   I was very sad to learn that Molten Chocolate Cake dessert can be microwaved in a minute and served.  Sigh.

One time, at Outback Steakhouse, my plate came out with a plastic bag on it.  Inside the bag were my veggies, freshly microwaved, I presume.    Honestly, it’s why I cook.   I know where my stuff comes from and who made it.

So, inspired by some of the most esteemed names in French Cooking saying they had to preserve the French Cuisine, I wanted to make a real, authentic shortcake.  My small attempt to rescue the true shortcake from the “dessert shell” purgatory it’s currently in.   On the plus side, there are plenty of old recipes.  On the minus side, they are all different.   Of course they are!!!

First of all, shortcake is not so named because the cake is short.  It’s because a fat inhibits the flour from forming long structures.   Adding a fat (in this case two, butter and shortening) creates the “short” part of the shortcake.    Shortcake also got a boost of lightness from the advent of chemical leaveners like baking soda and baking powder.    Traditional English shortcakes made without chemical leavening are extremely dense.

I think it’s amazing that a classic dessert is built around the humble strawberry.  A fruit that, realistically, was only available for a very few weeks every year.   Strawberries are fragile and they have a short harvest season.  Despite the restricted availability of strawberries during her time, Fannie Farmer has no fewer than 3 dessert recipes for just Strawberry Short Cake in just one of her cookbooks.  She also has one for “Fruit Short Cake”, which, according to Mrs. Farmer may also include strawberries.  The dessert called for the strawberry  to be paired with a quick cooking “shortcake”.  Originally, whipped cream was not part of the dessert.   Just a sweetened shortcake, strawberries, sugar and butter.  By the mid-1800s, whipped cream became integrated into the recipe.

While any berry could be used, the dessert is synonymous with strawberries.  You can certainly make a “raspberry shortcake”, but let’s just say they didn’t name a doll “Raspberry Shortcake”. This is certainly a classic summer recipe.  And, really, making the shortcake is very easy.  Make the whole dessert and really, you won’t be disappointed.

I love cooking from extremely old, some would say “historic” cookbook.  I feel a bit like an archeologist trying to recreate the exact dish the author did over a hundred years ago!  I picked a very traditional recipe from Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book called:  Rich Strawberry Short Cake, she credits a “Hotel Pastry Cook” with the recipe.

Rich Strawberry Short Cake

2 cups of flour
1/4 cup of sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/3 cup butter (about 5 1/3 tablespoons butter, diced)
1 1/4 tablespoons lard or vegetable shortening
1 egg, well beaten
2/3 cup of milk
1 pint strawberries, washed and quartered with tops removed
Sugar
1 quart heavy whipping cream

Heat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly grease 12 inch cast iron skillet with lard.

Mix dry ingredients and sift twice. Work in butter and lard to the flour mixture, until mixture appears crumbly. Add egg and milk. Stir until the dry ingredients are moistened. You may need to add a bit more milk if there is still a lot of dry flour. Place mixture in the cast iron skillet, and use your hands to spread mixture into the pan. (Tip, oil hands first!) Bake until the bottom is lightly browned and a slight crust is apparent when the shortcake is touched, about 12 minutes.

While the shortcake is baking, sprinkle enough sugar on the strawberries to sweeten the fruit and slightly macerate, about 1-2 tablespoons, depending on the strawberries.

Whip the cream until stiff peaks are formed. If sweet whipped cream is preferred, add a tablespoon of sugar to the cream while it is being whipped. A bit of vanilla extract (a teaspoon) can be added too.

Split shortcake, add whipped cream and strawberries layered with the shortcake, and serve.

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Frosting

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I am one of those people who could seriously leave the cake on a plate and just eat the frosting.  Love it.  Vanilla, chocolate, cream cheese or caramel, it is all good.  Of late, however, I notice this annoying trend of wrapping everything in fondant so that it looks smooth and perfect.  Frosting is not supposed to be perfect looking.   It’s supposed to look like something you want to dig your finger through.  Who isn’t jealous of the baby at his or her first birthday party completely engulfed in a buttercream glaze of frosting and cake bits?

Frosting, in all of its fluffy goodness, is a rather new “invention”. Most beginning cake toppings were thin affairs made with a combination of sugar and egg whites. An example of this type of recipe can be found in The New England Economical Housekeeper (1845):

Beat the whites of an egg to an entire froth, and to each egg an 5 teaspoonfuls loaf sugar, gradually; beat a great while. Put it on when your cake is hot or cold, as is most convenient. A little lemon juice squeezed into the eggs and sugar, improves it. Spread it on with a knife, and smooth it over with a soft brush, like a shaving brush.

Another early variation of frosting was the boiled frosting. Fannie Farmer’s recipe in her The 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is as follows:

Boiled frosting

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
Whites 2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla or 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice

Put sugar and water in saucepan, and site to prevent sugar from adhering to saucepan; heat gradually to boiling point, and boil without stirring until syrup will thread when dropped from tip of spoon or tines of silver fork. Pour syrup gradually on beaten white of egg, beating mixture constantly, and continue beating until right consistency to spread; then add flavoring and pour over cake, spreading evenly with back of spoon. Crease as soon as firm. If not beaten long enough, frosting will run; if beaten too long, it will not be smooth. Frosting beaten too long may be improved by adding a few drops of lemon juice or boiling water. This frosting is soft inside, and has a glossy surface.

Well, in today’s world, the first one would appear to kill you with Salmonella or any other bacterial plague bought about and worsened by factory farming.  The second one sounds kinda hard. Thread, soft ball, hard ball stages of melting and boiled sugar require more judgment than I care to employ for a cake frosting. The success of my kid’s birthday party can’t hinge on whether I boiled the sugar past the soft ball stage and into the hard ball stage. That’s too much pressure!!!

As a kid, frosting in a can was always a big hit. But, looking back, the ingredients look a touch sad:

Duncan Hines Creamy Homestyle Classic Chocolate Frosting (http://www.duncanhines.com/products/frostings/creamy-home-style-classic-chocolate-frosting)

Sugar, Water, Vegetable Oil Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oils, Mono- and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60), Cocoa Powder Processed with Alkali, Corn Syrup. Contains 2% Or Less Of: Corn Starch, Salt, Invert Sugar, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Carmelized Sugar (Sugar, Water), Caramel Color, Acetic Acid, Preservatives (Potassium Sorbate), Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Citric Acid, Sodium Citrate.

The other frosting trend when I was small was to use  the Wilton Buttercream Icing Recipe (frosting and icing are terms that are used rather interchangeably). You could decorate with it more easily, I suppose.  Wilton also helped to user icing flower decorations to the masses.  Rose covered cakes became all the rage.   The Wilton recipe combines confectioner’s sugar, butter, vegetable shortening, vanilla extract and a touch of milk. The mouthfeel is what you would expect when one eats vegetable shortening. Sort of waxy and thick. Whenever you see cakes in the bakery with “buttercream” listed as the frosting and they are decorated with blindingly white icing, remember what butter looks like and just know it might have some butter in there, but will likely have shortening as well. I am generally anti-shortening because of the severe manufacturing process that turns a soybean and a cottonseed into a solid mass of fat-like substance. And the taste. Ick.

Do you want a good looking frosting or a good tasting frosting? That’s the question. Sure, you can have a marble smooth covering on your cake that will look fantastic in pictures, but the taste? Eh. How much taste can you get out of sugar, glucose, vegetable shortening, gelatin, water and extract?  I’ll say it:   fondant isn’t good. It’s gummy and rather artificial tasting, as most fondants are manufactured and stored in plastic tubs indefinitely.  You can also have a beautiful white frosting, but you’ll get stuck with something made from shortening.

Or, you can go retro and have a frosting made with real butter.  It won’t be blinding white and you can’t make flowers out of it.  But, it will taste amazing.  Like, you are hoping some makes it on the cake amazing.  And frankly, it doesn’t really look “bad”.  And, you can make it chocolate or vanilla flavored!!

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My inspiration from this recipe came from an episode of Good Eats and a book named The Cake Mix Doctor.  I have every great cake book.  Ruth Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible?  Check.  Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Desserts and Cakes.  Check and Check.  Still, every cake I made was lacking.  Then I saw Alton Brown recommend a box cake mix.  Really?!?  According to him, you can’t beat the chemistry in a box for great cake.  With that logic, I found myself face to face with The Cake Mix Doctor book by Anne Byrn at a local bookseller and decided to try it for my son’s birthday.  He wanted a cake that “bled”.  So, I made the Red Velvet Cake.  First of all, it was so easy because it was a mix.  Second, he LOVED it.  Now, usually when people go to a kid’s birthday party, I never see the adults take a piece of cake.   I do the calculation myself and decide it’s not worth the calorie bomb to eat a piece of supermarket “buttercream” frosted cake and politely decline.  The kids love anything “cake”, and that’s what is important.  I don’t need it.

At my son’s party, not a single piece of cake remained.  It was gone.  The adults ate it.  No leftovers!!  The secret? Probably not the “doctored” German Chocolate Cake mix with sour cream and red food dye (although that was good), but the rich cream cheese frosting.  AMAZING.  Anne Byrn recommends homemade frosting for her doctored cake mixes, and includes several in her book.  She is right.  No one thought I used a mix, and the frosting was great,  but I have to doctor hers up a bit.  Hers are overly sweet for me.  My experiments are your gain.  Also, making your own cake will cost a fraction of a bakery cake, and be just as good.

Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting
Frosts a 2 layer 9 inch round cake
Total Time: 10-15 minutes

2 8 ounce packages cream cheese, softened
2 sticks (16 tablespoons) butter, softened
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 cups confectioner’s sugar, sifted

Cream together the cream cheese and butter in a large mixing bowl until well combined. Turn off the mixer. Add the cocoa powder, vanilla extract and confectioner’s sugar. Mix on low speed until the sugar and cocoa are mostly incorporated (this avoids the explosion of powdered ingredients). Increase to medium speed and beat the frosting until it is fluffy.

Done.

I know, not hard, right? Not scary, no fear of failing. Just awesome, spoon lickin’ frosting. If you don’t want chocolate, omit the cocoa powder and cut the sugar to 3 1/2 cups and it’s an awesome white frosting.

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