Red Velvet Cake Taste-Off: Round 2

In mid-November I conducted a taste test of Red Velvet Cake recipes (see blog entry here). I baked 8 different cakes and recruited 25 people to sample and rate the entries. The undisputed winner of the Red Velvet Taste-Off : Round 1 was:

Cake Man Raven's Red Velvet Cake
But the day after I compiled my results, I ran across yet another distinctive Red Velvet Cake recipe. This one was from Rose's Levy Beranbaum book Rose's Heavenly Cakes. The actual cake is called Rose Red Velvet and for its fat is uses butter and oil. It also uses more eggs than any of the other recipes I tested. The person who brought this cake to my attention said it was better than Cake Man Raven's! That got my attention. Better than Cake Man Raven? Red Velvet Cake Taste-Off #2 was on.

For this round I baked three different recipes:

• Rose's Red Velvet - Rose Levy Beranbaum - the challenger
• Cake Man Raven's - because it had won the first round of the taste test
• Waldorf Astoria recipe with a tweak - My original reason for conducting this taste test was to find a recipe that mimicked the Red Velvet Cake sold at Piccadilly Cafeteria (the absolute best RVC). Flavor and color wise I think the Waldorf cake comes the closest, but it is not nearly as moist as Piccadilly's. So in this test I added 1/4 cup of light corn syrup hoping to give it a little more moisture. Sadly my tweaked Waldorf did not produce a copy cat of Piccadilly RVC. Granted my tweak cake was better than the original, but still not measure up to Piccadilly's caliber.

So here are the three cakes all stacked up:



And sliced open:



So which do you think won? Which do you think looks the best?

Well the winner yet again was Cake Man Raven's Red Velvet Cake.

The Waldorf cake came in second and the Rose Red Velvet cake came in third. In this round I only had 9 taste testers, as opposed to the 25 testers in round one. Two of the tasters (the kids) picked the Rose cake as their favorite (they said it was the sweetest), but the other 7 had it as their least favorite. One of the biggest complaints about the Rose RVC was that it was too dry and two people remarked that it had a spongy, angel food cake texture. If you want to see a spreadsheet listing all the results click here.

So after two unbiased tests, the oil based Red Velvet Cake is still reigns as the undisputed favorite.

BUT even as I write this someone handed me yet another RVC recipe. It is Red Velvet time of the year. This one used uses brown sugar instead of white and a 1/2 cup cocoa. I must test this recipe, so stay tuned for round 3 of the Ultimate Red Velvet Taste-Off (some time around Christmas).