The Trouble with Red Velvet

 I'm  not a fan of dye or artificial ingredients, so when I was asked to make a red velvet wedding cake I was determined to do it naturally.  The baking frenzy that ensued was the most obsessive cooking endeavor I've ever been involved with, and included the boiling, roasting, pureeing and reducing of many many pounds of cooked beets.  I won't lie; it got ugly. 

 I baked between two and five sample cakes a day, a single-layer eight inch round, auditioning different recipes and trying different tricks between crazy amounts of googling.  I have read everything ever published on the internet about red velvet cake.  The results were mostly cakes that were decidedly neither red nor velvety, and the only one I succeeded in keeping red tasted like borscht. 

 The problem is pH.  Baked goods that are red are acidic; baking soda, the main leavening agent in baked goods, is alkaline.  An alkaline cake = brown cake.  I tried and tried and tried: I added more acid, left out the baking soda, reduced the beets for longer, added tons of lemon juice directly to the beets.  I'd end up most times with a beautifully scarlet batter, but 30 minutes later I'd pull a brown cake out of the oven. 

 I finally gave in and bought red dye, then baked off the wedding cake, wrapped it and froze it.  Then proceeded to have nightmares about how brown the cake still was, and woke up with a conviction: I'm not proud of that cake. 

So I started again.

 In all, I baked 27 layers of cake over the course of four days.  The final result, while brown on the outside, was a satisfying ruby red on the inside thanks to the four jars of red gel dye I used.

 It was an interesting lesson in delivering a product I was not, in an ultimate sense, proud of.  I don't believe in sacrificing flavor for visual presentation, and the nature of red velvet cake is such that only a minimal amount of cocoa powder can be used without turning the whole thing brown.  In my rebellion, I added extra vanilla, lemon zest and a pinch of cinnamon.  I'm not going to bother putting up the recipe, because taste-wise it was unremarkable.  I realized the next day that when I scaled up the recipe I finally settled on after dozens of changes and substitutions, I forgot to scale up the amount sour cream I used and the final cake came out a little dry.  I got lots of feedback about the frosting, which confirmed my belief that cake is really just a vehicle for frosting.  I hate that about cake. 

Flowers by Maureen Arpin

I'm not sure what I'll do if I'm asked to make another red velvet cake.  I understand the appeal of a jewel-red cake visually, but the flavor trade off still troubles me on a deeply spiritual level.  Pleasure should be about pleasure, and when all is said and done I'd rather eat an ugly tasty cake than a beautiful flavorless one.  That's what troubles me about this wedding cake; it failed to maximize the opportunity for pleasure, something I feel confident my previous wedding cakes accomplished.  

Still, it was an interesting experience to add to my cake baking evolution.  I look back at some of the cakes I've made and cringe with embarrassment that I served them in public, but I realize that I had to make those first, lumpy cakes to get to the smooth, sleek ones.  Because I'm all about growth.

A Baby Shower Cake

 I am getting around.  In a cake baking kind of way, that is.  A friend of a friend is being thrown a fancy baby shower today, and I got to make the cake.  I lost a little of my enthusiasm as I was whipping up a batch of frosting at 9 p.m. last night, knowing I would be frosting into the wee hours.  As the cake started coming together I got more and more excited, and when I was finished with the rows of tiny dots I almost woke up Aaron so he could admire it in real time.  I decided he could wait until this morning, and as a testament to my cake obsession I woke up at 7 a.m. and couldn't go back to sleep.  I never wake up at 7 a.m., or have trouble going back to sleep.  Generally speaking, 7 a.m. and I are strangers. 

I blame the flowers.  I bought some beautiful baby blue hydrangeas yesterday and congratulated myself for getting the flowers a day ahead of time, but it was warm and by the time I got them home the poor hydrangeas had wilted.  So I got up early this morning, had coffee with Aaron and then went to not one but two stores in search of suitable gilding.  Hydrangeas aren't really in season, so I got roses and gerbera daisies with some pale green (scarce)hydrangeas for accent. 

Because it's important to see these things from all angles.

Look!  Cute dots!

I love the brown centers of these daisies.

From the top.

And now I want to make myself a wedding cake.

I can sort of understand the appeal of flowers made from frosting in that the end result is an entirely edible cake, but I think real flowers are so much lovelier.  Plus it's not that much work to take a rose or two off your slice of cake before eating it.  I am now fantasizing about having my own bakery and making cupcakes that are each topped with a single baby rose, you know those tiny ones sold in three-dozen bunches?  I'd top the vanilla frosted cupcakes with a tiny red rose, and the chocolate frosted cupcakes with a pale pink rose.  Then I'd probably have to make some robin's egg colored frosted cupcakes and top them with orange roses...

Also, I finished this cake a full five hours before delivery time.  I'm getting almost professional.

Excess? What Excess?

We were invited to my aunt's Christmas dinner cruise on a beautiful boat, and I volunteered to bring dessert. My aunt requested something along the lines of a red velvet cake with crushed candy canes. I latched onto the candy cane idea and then got a little out of control with it. I ended up adding a few more holly leaves around the bottom, but didn't have time to take more pictures because I was of course working on the cake up until the very last minute. I'm kind of in love with red and white, and I just happen to have a ginormous holly bush in my back yard.

This cake was so much fun to make; the boys helped me unwrap all the little round candies and were really good about not licking one single piece. The cake was chocolate-peppermint and the frosting was my usual Swiss Butter Cream, but I added some peppermint extract to match the candy cane theme. There was a lot of cake left over and my aunt asked me if I wanted to take some home, but I sent it all home with her because as it turns out, I still prefer decorating a cake to eating it.

AWOL

It's been a crazy-good, jam-packed kind of a week. I spent a good portion of it working on that cake; baking it, wrapping it in obscene amounts of plastic wrap, freezing it, transporting it, constructing it, frosting it, watching the frosting melt off of it, sticking it in the fridge and telling the frosting to think about what it had done, and finally, carrying all 20 lbs. of it to the table without tripping so that lovely couple up there could cut it. Nick and Jaime eloped and never had a wedding reception, so on Saturday we had a down-home barbecue and all-around love fest to celebrate. The next day I made another cake because there was a birthday and frankly, I can't help myself. For now, I'm going to go lie in the sun while my kids play with the hose and work really hard at doing nothing strenuous.