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.

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7-17-2006 @3:59PM Runner said... Magnolia makes the best red velvet cake I've ever had! I love when they have the cupcakes. I prefer a butter-cream frosting (not a fan of cream-cheese frosting). I'm also planning to go to the Cocoa Bar in Brooklyn (Park Slope?) to try their red velvet cake, which has a cinnamon frosting. MMM
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7-17-2006 @4:04PM sofia said... my cousin got me hooked on red velvet cake...she makes a *delicious* version...not sure where her recipe comes from
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7-17-2006 @4:16PM liz said... red velvet cake has been a southern classic for decades.
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7-17-2006 @4:45PM Jennifer said... And, of course, red velvet cake's most famous cinematic moment comes in that southern classic, Steel Magnolias. The groom's cake is a red velvet, shaped like an armadillo.
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7-17-2006 @5:46PM peggy said... i have a box of duncan hines red velvet cake that i keep in the pantry for when i get home sick for nashville... from portland. i'll let you know how it turns out when i break down and finally make it.
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7-17-2006 @5:49PM Finished.Law.School said... Just the type of Slashfood post I was hoping for: one with a recipe worth using! Now if the author would only come back with a proper list of ingredients...
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7-17-2006 @6:57PM Dr. Electro said... Fear not the food coloring! After all, it's RED velvet cake, not pink!
I love red velvet. It's practically the only cake I will eat any more. For health reasons, I have to be very sparing in the amount of cake I eat. Even then, I often wind up taking extra insulin to get the glucose back under control but it's worth it.
Locally, I can get a personal-size red velvet cake for (believe it or not) two for a dollar! I will split one and eat half one evening for dessert and the other half the next evening. Okay, I'm a cake wuss but I don't care. My treats are few and far between and I refuse to give up my red velvet!
I want to be buried with a red velvet cake.
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7-17-2006 @6:59PM Dr. Electro said... and a fork, of course.
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7-18-2006 @1:10AM heather said... My family has been making red velvet cake...at least since the 50's. Southern of course. I love cream cheese frosting, but it isn't the TRUE frosting that goes with the "real" thing. It's a cooked butter cream frosting, and if you ever do get the real thing...you'll know why! Try it slightly chilled, and skip the Betty Crocker version.
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7-18-2006 @1:21PM Haley said... To Peggy, and others of course, the red velvet cake from a box is wonderful, its pretty much just rich chocolate cake, same texture and everything, with red food coloring. A friend of mine uses red velvet cake as a festive birthday cake, or i imagine it would be fun for Valentines day as well.
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7-18-2006 @3:04PM Jim said... There are people in this country that haven't heard of red velvet cake? Seriously?
You might as well have started the article off with:
"When my dear friend Yukari brought me this newfangled thing called a 'hamburger' the other afternoon, I thought I must have died and gone to some sort of junk food heaven".
THAT'S how surprised I am that red velvet cake is somehow "new" to you folks.
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7-18-2006 @3:39PM mshastid said... 7 years ago i dated a southern gal from mississippi and that was when i discovered the amazingness that is red velvet cake.
too bad kroger butchered the darn recipe with an overly dense, sickly-sweetly frosted version.
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7-23-2006 @4:27PM thejanius said... what is it about red velvet cake anyway? i'm not a cake person at all, but this stuff is ADDICTING!
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8-01-2006 @12:19PM vicki said... the original frosting recipe is like nothing like you've ever tasted. the recipe is;
1 cup milk
5 tablespoons plain flour
1 cup butter,softened
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
mix flour and milk in saucepan, cook until thick. cover and refrigerate till completely chilled. in a mixing bowl beat butter, and vanilla til creamy add chilled milk and flour mixture and beat till light and fluffy about six or eight minutes. i always double the recipe because i like a lot of frosting and i have to "taste" it a lot while i'm making it. you can use a half a cup of crisco and a half a cup of butter and beat it for ten minutes instead of all butter. it's not as hard to make as it sounds and it's really worth the effort. the cake needs to be refrigerated because the frosting has a texture like whipped cream.
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9-07-2006 @5:44PM LINDA COX said... The best RED VELVET CAKE that was ever made was in a little bakery in New Orleans off Chef Manture (sp) Hwy.
I think the bakery was called LAWRENCES CAKE SHOP. I used to have them freeze six for me each time we went to NO just to bring home to Dallas. They had them with the traditional fluffy frosting, cocoanut and cherry. However their cakes were super moist, and I don't remember there being any cocoa in them.. they were too red. I would gladly pay for their recipe. I wrote the Times in NO last year and was told that they sold the bakery to Gambino's.. and I know it isn't the same!
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9-08-2006 @8:38AM LINDA COX said... Would anyone happen to have that recipe? I will buy it if anyone knows what cookbook it is in.
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