Red Velvet Cakes and Cupcakes Recipes

iStock_000007653498XSmallWhen I say I love Red Velvet Cake, I feel like I need to be more specific because there are so many different recipes that what I’m thinking of may not be too much like what comes to your mind. This is one of those recipes people have really corrupted over the years, calling almost any baked good with some red food coloring “red velvet.” Done right, this cake is a completely different experience than when it’s done wrong.

Red velvet cake should be lightly sweet and lightly chocolatey (so lightly that it’s hard to identify the cocoa flavor) and very moist. The icing should also be lightly sweet, not coated with coconut shavings or powdered sugar, with either a light buttery flavor or a slight tang from cream cheese (like carrot cake frosting).

Here’s a recipe for red velvet cupcakes. Note that all the sweetness in the cake is coming from one and a half cups of sugar, and the icing – which is where a lot of recipes get too sweet – should be only lightly sweet (actually, I would use a bit less sugar than that, but you can taste as you add it in to get it just right for your palate). The big advantage of cupcakes is that you don’t have to ice the cake layer by layer, which can cause the icing to overwhelm the flavor of the cake.

Here’s another very similar recipe for red velvet cake. The icing here will be the lightly buttery kind I was talking about.

And here’s another recipe for the cream cheese based icing. This one uses white chocolate, but it won’t really taste like it.

Note that you can use food coloring to make the cake other colors. Without any food coloring, it’s yellowish. Some people put coconut shavings or pecans on top of the icing. There are a lot of ways to go to customize this cake.

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