now, i have never ever attempted a cake like this, as i have always believed that you can only make a red velvet cake with gel food colouring which i don't have. but one day, i was browsing through joy of baking and found a recipe that used liquid food colouring - yay! off i went to buy my food colouring and start to bake. the original recipe was iced with cream cheese frosting but i like vanilla buttercream so, so sooo much more, so i swapped it, and make a yummy topping :)
i won't post the whole recipe, because you cand find it
here, and the buttercream recipe
here, but here are my pictures anyway :)
the recipe used up a whole bottle of red food colouring! but don't worry, you won't actually be eating the whole bottle, as it is spread through the cake, so you'll be eating, say, an 1/8 of a bottle - unless you decide to treat yourself and eat half of it, then you'd eat half a bottle :P
the mixture is really, really thin cause you add the buttermilk mixed with food colouring, which thins down the mixture, but that's okay, it's meant to be like that :)
before baking, the mix is bright, blood red, if somebody walked into the kitchen and didn't know what you were doing, you'd have a lot of questions to answer!
its really important that you leave the cakes to cool completely before icing, cause, especially if you use buttercream, the heat will cause the icing to go all funny and un-yummy.
i doubled the quantity of buttercream to cover the whole cake, because 1. i didn't think it would be sufficient to cover the whole cake and 2. i like a good, thick layer of icing rather than a thin coverage. the more you whip the icing, the lighter and fluffier it will be, the more yummy, and the brighter white.
this was literally, a massive cake. a cake for special occasions, or, if you are part of my family, a cake for dessert on sunday :) but seriously, it is really really tall. make sure you put a decent amount of icing in the middle to both even out the dome of the first cake, and to make it more yummy
if i had enough time, and it was for a special occasion, i would have used a crumb coat, chilled it, and the iced it again to prevent the red specks showing through. but i had neither, so i just ploughed away with the icing.
the inside turned out to be a dark, blood beetrooty red, not the bright, vibrant red that i had imagined, but, if i'm honest, i think it looked better and didn't affect the taste anyway.
surprisingly, as soon as my youngest brother found out about the amount of food colouring in the cake, he rejected it and refused to eat any more - leaving the rest of it for me and the others.
ahh well, eat with a fork and a mug of steaming tea. nomnomnommm xxx
