All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [69]
Dark-Chocolate Red Velvet Cake
For Those for Whom Plain Red Velvet Cake is Too Jejune
Think of red velvet as devil’s food that has been kicked up a notch. Like a lot of fancy-pants cakes, it’s thought to be a Southern invention. Red on the inside, fluffy white frosting on the outside, it’s “the Dolly Parton of cakes: a little bit tacky, but you love her”, according to Atlanta food writer Angie Mosier. It was the signature dessert at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the 1920s, but fell out of favor after WWII, when red food dye was believed to cause cancer. Thankfully, food chemists have gotten smarter, so red food dye is back in.
So is red velvet cake, thanks in part to that horrible 1989 film Steel Magnolias (starring Dolly Parton, interestingly enough). I HATED it. But there was a scene with an armadillo-shaped red velvet cake, frosted with gray icing. It was very tacky (like the movie) and blindingly red inside.
Jessica Simpson, a Texan, chose red velvet cake for her nonstick 2002 nuptials to Nick Lachey. On one level this is not surprising, because Jessica is a big Dolly Parton fan. Her cake, thankfully, was not shaped like an armadillo.
Red velvet cakes traditionally contain cocoa, though I have tasted some that didn’t seem to. They were fine cakes, but not as good. Kind of like drag queens doing Dolly. Cocoa adds flavor and enhances the red color.
Quick question here: do you know why devil’s food cake is called that? Some surmise that it’s just so delicious that to eat it is a sin, but the late Supreme Master Extraordinaire of All Things Culinary and authoritative cookbook author James
Beard thought it was named after its reddish tint. The tint is produced when cocoa is present in a recipe containing baking soda and an acid (such as buttermilk or vinegar), to which the baking soda reacts. According to one theory, prior to the 1920s, home bakers began adding beet juice or red food dye to exaggerate the redness of devil’s food cake, and the result was red velvet cake.
I hate beets. I also hate red food dye because frequently red velvet recipes call for a whole bottle and if you’re not careful, your kitchen will look like the crime scene from Fargo, with the KitchenAid mixer standing in for the wood chipper. And really, it doesn’t take that much red food coloring to make a cake red. So I use half the recommended amount. Because I’m working with dark chocolate, my red velvet cake isn’t blindingly red; it’s more of a deep, chocolaty red, a shade down from burgundy.
The foundation cake for this recipe is from Southern Living magazine. I substituted sour cream for buttermilk. Originally, this cake called for unsweetened cocoa, but I love Hershey’s Dutch process Special Dark Cocoa too much, so baking powder has been added.
After trying this recipe, if you want an easy, tasty, and very moist yellow cake perfect for frosting, simply skip the cocoa, baking powder, and, of course, the food coloring.
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YOU’LL NEED
Two 8-inch or 9-inch round cake pans
A food processor
FOR THE CAKE
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1¼ cups sugar
1¼ cups light brown sugar
6 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ cup Dutch process cocoa
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 cup sour cream
½ounce red food coloring (half a 1-ounce standard bottle)
FOR THE FROSTING
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
Two 8-ounce packages cream cheese, at room temperature
Two 16-ounce boxes confectioners’ sugar (about 3¾ cups each)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
TO MAKE THE CAKE
1. Position a rack in lower third of the oven and preheat to 325 degrees F. Prepare the cake pans.
2. Cream the butter in a mixer on medium speed, then