Red Velvet in the Pink Palace
We have a birthday in the Pink Palace today! I love birthdays. I also love my roommate Holly. She dedicates a lot of time to making other people smile, so I wanted to return the favor and make her smile on her birthday. I was bummed that I won’t be around this weekend to help her celebrate, but luckily Holly’s work schedule left me with all of Thursday night to whip something up in the kitchen! We also had a lovely pre-birthday celebration at Paolo’s in Georgetown on Wednesday– I highly recommend their happy hour: $3 dollars for cocktails, house wine, and beer; really tasty mini plates for $3-5 (not your typical bar food!) and ooooh, the bread sticks!
Anyway, I was tipped off by a super secret anonymous source that red velvet is Holly’s favorite cake, and Wednesday night on our “short-cut” home through Baked and Wired, she conveniently mentioned her love of cream cheese frosting. So yesterday I begin perusing the internet for recipes for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I didn’t have to go far; one of my favorite cooking blogs, Sugar Plum, had the perfect red velvet cake recipe that I was easily able to turn into cupcakes. I’m so impressed by this blog. Unlike my own pattern of foraging the internet for recipes, taking pictures of myself making them in a much less aesthetically pleasing way than the original cook, and inserting semi-witty commentary regarding details of my life you may or may not have any desire to hear about, Emily makes up all of her own recipes… and oh are they good! Maybe someday.
I’ve never made a red velvet cake before, but I’ve been eager to try new challenges. Actually I’m not sure if I’ve ever made cupcakes; definitely not from scratch. You see, I’ve never been much of a baker. I love the freedom of being able to improvise when cooking and some of my best meals are thrown together because I don’t want to waste the ingredients. The precision necessary in baking makes me nervous. And red velvet cakes are very hit or miss; if not done right, it’s a very ‘blah’ cake and if you’ve never had a good one I can see why you’d wonder what all the hype is about. So here I am, a Northern girl who’s a self-professed non-baker, setting out to make a fussy Southern dessert.
I barely had to buy any new ingredients to make these; the recipe is really quite simple. Emily mentions in her blog that the need for the white vinegar called for in many red velvet cake recipes is only a myth. I read a little bit about this myth (and the many others surrounding this popular cake!) and found that originally, the acidic ingredients such as buttermilk and vinegar that were used to activate baking soda interacted with the cocoa, revealing the red anthocyanin. Now that we primarily use Dutch processed cocoa, the red color would be muted and without red food coloring or a natural red coloring such as beets. I went with the food coloring… a whole bottle of it! You should have seen the kitchen; pretty sure my roommates would have thought that one of our mice friends had gotten caught in the line of fire of my hand mixer had they come home while I was making these!
I managed not to burn the cupcakes (quite a fete in our oven) and I managed to frost them, but still I was skeptical. I hadn’t had a strong desire to lick the batter bowl clean, which is uncharacteristic and worrisome. I couldn’t serve them without trying one. I cut one in half, planning to just have a taste. Next think I knew, I’d devoured the entire cupcake and set two aside for my drive to Blacksburg. Success!
