Red Velvet Cake

I noticed when WordPress created the slug for this post that I’d had another red velvet cake post in the past. Apparently, I wasn’t enamored with the results of the red velvet recipe in Rose’s Heavenly Cakes. Hopefully this version goes down better. I realized while making it tonight that it’s in keeping with my theme for the past week. I was on a trip to Nashville for work, for the PTC Live Global trade show/conference. The conference and work part was fine, but after the work was over, I had a good time with some co-workers, exploring what Nashville had to offer.

We experienced lots of “Southern” food, including gator, Nashville hot chicken, and plenty of BBQ. The “Southern” food is what got me on this tangent. I always think of red velvet cake as a Southern thing. I’m not sure if that’s reality, or if that’s just the association stuck in my head from Steel Magnolias. Maybe both.

My routine’s still out of whack from the trip, so I managed to forget my gym clothes at home when I left this morning. As a result, instead of hitting the gym after work, I stopped for some frozen raspberries on the way, and headed home to bake.

Anyway, on to the cake. It’s pretty simple to put together, really. The hardest part is the raspberry sauce topping, and that’s not exactly difficult.

I meant to bake this on Sunday afternoon, but the one thing I ‘always’ keep in the freezer wasn’t there when I went to look. Can you guess what it is?

I figured setting the raspberries in the sun to thaw would be just as good (or maybe better) than the oven with the light on, so that’s what I did.

First step is to cream together the butter, sugar, and oil.

Then mix up the dry ingredients, and measure out the buttermilk, and add those.

Beat that together, then add the egg whites & food colouring in 2 batches.

Put your neon pink cake into the oven. Why pink and not red? My bottle of food colouring was about 9 ml short of what the recipe called for… though I’m not at all opposed to feeding pink cake to the group of guys I eat lunch with on Thursdays. 🙂

After that was baked and cooling, and after supper, I started on the raspberry sauce. The first step is to get rid of the seeds. Jay got me this food mill last year, and this has been my first opportunity to try it. I used the finest strainer plate.

Unfortunately, Rose is right – raspberry seeds are tiny, and only the finest sieve catches all of them. Unfortunately, the finest sieve is also a giant pain to press raspberries through, so I’m pretty happy with the results.

After boiling down the juice released by the thawing raspberries, you mix that in with the purée, and a bit of sugar.

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the sauce was to apply to the cake, though I made a bit of a mess of the plate, and had to clean it up, lest it look like the scene of a gruesome stabbing.

Like I said earlier, I had plans to bake this on Sunday afternoon, but I didn’t realize until too late that I had no unsalted butter in the house. On the plus side, baking it tonight means I can take it in to share for BBQ at work tomorrow… and sharing dessert is always a good thing, especially when you skip the gym. 😉

PS: Does anyone else get antsy when they haven’t baked in a couple of weeks? I missed the brioche, so I’ll have to play catch up. Thinking about combining the brioche dough with what I remember of my mom’s cinnamon bun recipe… Also, it’s finally strawberry season, so I’ve got a shortcake to make!

PPS: Adding a picture of the crumb: