The Sins of Red Velvet Cake

When my dear friend Yukari brought my red velvet cake the other afternoon, I thought I must have died and gone to some sort of sugar-baked heaven. I asked her where she discovered this bizarre, deep red, Satanic looking concoction. Apparently it's all over Brooklyn, and she'd found out about it while working in the Buttacup Lounge.

For the unfamiliar, red velvet cake is party punch red and coated in thick white frosting. It's an equally decadent relative of chocolate cake. My own limited run-ins with it haven't yielded particularly chocolatey tasting encounters, but its richness and snowy cream cheese dressing could satisfy any chocolate lover's deepest desire.

A sort of red-velvet-legend attributes this cake to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. A guest ordered a slice and liked it so much that she asked for the recipe. The hotel gave it up and billed her $100. Furious, she spread the recipe around in chain letters. While cute, this story just isn't true. According to What's Cooking America, the hotel has no record of this incident, though I'm sure they'd gladly take credit for it. This recipe, like so many others, probably developed in the kitchens of homemakers-in this instance, the Southern house belles. They would bake chocolate cakes with natural cocoa powder, as opposed to the less acidic Dutch process cocoa available today. The natural cocoa powder yielded a red brown chocolate cake, dubbed either red velvet or Devil's food cake. When Dutch process cocoa became more common, the two cakes split: one developed into the dark brown chocolate cake we know today, and the other remained red brown. Over time, cooks supplemented the color of the red velvet cake with red food coloring. This produced the dynamic Superman red we know today.

Some balk at the idea of dumping food coloring into their mixing bowls. They fear carcinogens in the dye or-perhaps worse-a dish made from inorganic, inexpensive, un-foodie items. For God's sakes, relax. If you're so fearful of high falutin', you shouldn't even be on the Internet anyway. You should be holed up in a bunker somewhere, sulking.

If you are interested in making these, the omnipotent Betty Crocker even provides a readymade tub of cream cheese frosting to go with it.

Be not tempted! Betty Crocker got me through many a college birthday, but this will not do our redheaded step-cake justice. About.com had a recipe that states the correct amount of food coloring and provided a recipe for cream cheese frosting, though I'd personally forgo the pecans. Other frostings are just as good as cream cheese, but I happen to like mine that way. And anything less than two ounces of dye won't bring forth a red enough cake

Start with a 350 degree pre-heated oven and three greased and floured 8-inch cake pans. Beat half a cup of shortening until fluffy, slowly adding 1 ½ cups sugar, two eggs, food coloring, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract. In a separate bowl, combine 2 ½ cups sifted cake flour, half a teaspoon of salt, and two teaspoons of cocoa; in another separate bowl, bring together one cup of buttermilk, one tablespoon of vinegar, and one teaspoon of baking soda. Alternate adding the flour or buttermilk mixture into the shortening mix, but be sure to begin and end with the flour mixture. Once combined, beat at medium speed for two more minutes, and then pour into the pans. Bake for 25 minutes. While waiting, whip together eight ounces of cream cheese, half a stick of butter, 16 ounces of confectioner's sugar, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract. Once the cakes have cooled completely, remove them from the pans and frost the top and between layers.

Yukari's very first night with this cake started on a very low note. Any Brooklynite can tell you our borough offers some of the most eclectic and interesting nightspots but the business is slow and inconsistent compared to Manhattan. Buttacup Lounge packed on random weekday nights and paid gas, cable, and drinks for a week, but Yukari would walk out the following Friday with barely 30 bucks in her back pocket.

One Saturday night, Yukari told me, she closed out a slow shift and tipped out my bartender Charlie. "I checked my paperwork and counted my cash; barely enough for care fare. Saturday night and five tables. What the hell did I come in here for? This isn't worth my time, I thought."

"Charlie poured me a stiff one and fled to the kitchen. I gulped angrily and set aside a percentage for the busser. Charlie returned, grinning inanely. He held a plate with a blood red slice of cake, sprinkled with powdered sugar.

"'What's that?' I snapped.

"'Red velvet cake. It'll make you feel better.' "Skeptical, I shaved off the triangle tip and ate it. Within seconds, I was halfway through the slice. 'Whoa, He tried to grab a bite with his own fork, and I thwarted his move. A minute later, I was stuffed full with moist breadiness and thick frosting. My sour mood had sweetened, but I'd lost a friend in Charlie. It was worth it, though."

I made a note not to share any red velvet cake with Yukari.

It's true, this stuff occasionally comes to the coffee shop near the school I work at, and I've seen grown women stab each other with plastic forks over the last slice.

If you should ever see a slice of impossibly dark red cake with thick white frosting anywhere, grab all you can, and hide it, hide it in your refrigerator and never tell a living soul.