I love everything Red Velvet so I have been toying with the idea of compiling all my favorite Red Velvet recipes into an e-book, but a quick search of Amazon found that someone had already done it! Damn, too late again.
Check out Debra Hart's Red Velvet Everything. The book has recipes for Red Velvet Cobbler, Red Velvet Tea Cakes, Red Velvet Fudge, etc, etc. So many choices so little stretch left in my jeans.
For my first Red Velvet Everything baking adventure I decided on Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake. Just the name makes me drool. The recipe starts as a basic cream cheese pound cake but it gets fancy in the last stage when you split the batter add the Red Velvet “elixir” to one half.
At this point I have one bowl of red batter on one of yellow batter. Next the recipe instructions tell you to add 1-1/2 cups of flour to the red mix and the remaining 1-1/2 cups to the yellow mix. Huh??? That step had me worried. I didn’t think to weigh the bowls of wet batter to ensure that they each had the same amount. Did I get more batter in one bowl and less in the other? Would this throw off the ratios and put too much or too little flour in relation to the butter/sugar/eggs? Would my cake be too wet or too dry? Would my Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake be a flop?Oh the horror!!
Well, too late to worry about it now. But NEXT TIME I will weigh the batter to make sure the amounts are equal, or better yet mix in the flour before dividing the batter. That would eliminate any potential screw-ups.
Next the instructions tell you to drop spoonfuls of the batter into the
prepared tube pan alternating between the red and the yellow batters. I
bought a new silicon tube pan just for this cake. For some reason my
oven burns every cake I bake in the traditional metal bundt pans,
so I wanted to give the silicon pan a try. The HIC Fluted Pan is a
pretty red color, which sadly doesn’t show up well against the red
batter of the cake. Sorry….
So I’m moving along happily filling my pan spoonful by spoonful when I realized I have too much batter and not enough pan. The recipe didn't list what size pan to use, so naive little me just assumed that the batter would all fit in the pan "I" happened to select. I’m constantly amazed at how oblivious I can be…
But not to worry. I greased up some of my mini tube pans, and soon I was spooning again.
Next you swirl the two colored batters together. Pretty.
Then bake. I baked the mini tube pan for about 30 minutes, and the big pan for about 1 hour and 45 minutes.
The mini pan cakes came out perfect.
But the large cake was slightly over baked. I baked until to toothpick tester came out clean, but next time I would take it out when a few crumbles still clung to the tooth pick. Better to under baked than over baked.
Next came a simple sugar glaze. Then the slicing and big reveal.
Too cute. The red and yellow swirls look amazing. The colors are still distinct, but they swirl together like young lovers. So romantic. Definitely a cake for Valentine’s Day.
The larger cake looks just as swirly and delicious, but I had to add some whipped cream to give it a little moisture.
So all-in-all my first test from the Red Velvet Everything cook book was a great success. Now I just have to figure out what to bake next. With 50+ recipes in the book it will be a hard decision to make.
The people at work are going to love/kill me,
Carol
PS: for a similar version of Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake check out this YouTube video by Cicone.
Red Velvet Cream Cheese Pound Cake
By Debra Hart
From the book: Red Velvet Everything
Ingredients
1-1/2 cups Unsalted butter, softened
8 oz Cream Cheese, softened
3 cups Sugar, granulated
5 Eggs, large
1-1/2 tsp Vanilla
1/4 cup Buttermilk
2 TBLS Cocoa Powder, sifted
1 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar
1 oz Red Food Coloring
3 cups Cake Flour
Directions
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Grease and flour a tube pan.
- Cream butter, cream cheese and sugar together.
- Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
- Divide the batter between two bowls. Weigh to ensure that they are divided equally.
- In a separate, small bowl combine buttermilk, cocoa, and vinegar. Whisk until smooth. Stir in food coloring. Add the red mixture to one of the bowls of batter. Stir until combined.
- Add 1-1/2 cups of flour to each bowl of batter. Beat until just combined. (I just stirred the flour into the creamed mixture, I didn’t bother with the beaters.)
- With a large spoon drop spoonfuls of batter into the prepared tube pan alternating between the two colored batters.
- Using a knife, gently swirl the two colors. (Don’t over-swirl. You want the colors to just wrap around each other.)
- Bake at 300 degrees F for 1 hour and 35-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out (nearly) clean.
- Allow to cool for 10 minutes and then gently remove the cake from the pan.
If desired glaze the cake with a powdered sugar glaze.
