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Note Added:
Update: I have developed a recipe that I like much MUCH better. The recipe is for cupcakes but you can double it and have enough for a layer cake (2 layers). … It can be found on this site at Red Velvet and Cheesecake Marbled Cupcakes.
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NOTE ADDED: If you want a REDDER cake you will need to use LESS chocolate in BOTH recipes. If you are planning on doing this for a special event where the color matters to you PLEASE bake a test cake to see how your color comes out. With the beet colored cake especially the color will be partially determined by the color of the beets you use! I suggest you read ALL the comments before deciding to bake this cake. Thanks.
If you have never heard of red velvet cake you probably live on another planet, or something. At the very least you have never watched Steel Magnolias.
Red Velvet cake is a southern thing, I think, but rapidly gaining favor across the country. Apparently the red color was a natural reaction between the acid in the buttermilk, and the cocoa that was made in the early part of the 1900s. During the depression bakers also used beets to add color to the cakes that lacked color due to butter and egg rationing (never mind the scarcity of chocolate).
It happens to be my oldest son’s favorite cake, or it was when he left home to join the Air Force 4 years ago. At this point he is a health food freak so probably power bars are what he likes the best.
It always seemed a Christmas Cake to me, but lately I have seen it turn up around Valentine’s Day, and it makes sense. Most of the time the red color is created by adding a bottle of red food color. If you have issues with food dyes then consider the second recipe, a traditional one, made with beets.
The picture is from Swiss Colony . I just didn’t get time to make one. You can do it in several layers (more traditional and very impressive) or just two. The frosting is most often cream cheese, and that is what I am using because it is my favorite. This page licensed to B5 media, for exclusive use on Baking Delights, (http://bakingdelights.com), written by Marye Audet. Any other use constitutes fraud. If you are reading this on another website, the material is stolen content.
Red Velvet Cake Recipe (made with red food coloring)
5 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
3 ounces red food coloring
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon white vinegar
Grease and flour two 9 inch round pans.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees .
Make a paste of cocoa and food coloring. Set aside.
Combine the buttermilk, salt and vanilla.
In a large bowl, cream together the oil and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.
Stir in the cocoa mixture. Beat until well mixed and batter is evenly colored.
Beat in the buttermilk mixture alternately with the flour, mixing just until incorporated. Stir together baking soda and vinegar, then gently fold into the cake batter.
Pour batter into prepared pans. Bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
Allow to cool completely before frosting.
Traditional Red Velvet Cake Recipe ( made with beets)
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1 c pureed cooked beets
2 1/4 cups flour
1/3 cup cocoa
2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1 1/4 cups firmly packed light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
2/3 cup buttermilk
2 tsp. cider vinegar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees .
Butter and flour two 9 inch cake pans.
Melt chocolate in double boiler and set aside .
Sift together flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt.
In a bowl beat butter, sugars, eggs and vanilla until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Beat in chocolate. In four steps, alternately beat in flour mixture and buttermilk mixed with vinegar , beginning and ending with flour. Beat until incorporated. Add pureed beets and mix until well blended.
Divide the batter between the pans. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until cake tester inserted in center comes out clean and top of cake springs back when lightly pressed.
Cool cakes in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes and invert onto racks to cool completely.
To Make 4 layers:
Carefully slice each layer in half when cool.
Cream Cheese Frosting
16 oz cold cream cheese
1/2 c unsalted butter, softened
1 Tbs vanilla
Confectioners sugar (about 6-8 cups)
Beat cream cheese with softened butter and vanilla until combined. Gradually add 2 c. powdered sugar . Continue to add more powdered sugar until you reach a good consistency for spreading.
that beautiful cake!!!!!!
It’s the addition of the cocoa that keeps it from being RED! This is a simple variation that workd for me while still using beets. Leave out the cocoa and add 1/2 cup Greek yogurt. It retains it’s RED nomenclature.
The beet cake was amazing! It turned out moist, dense and chocolately. The batter was a beautiful crimson but, after baking, it turned brown. I’m going to start calling this my “chocolate beet cake” instead of red velvet cake.
I used more beets than the recipe called for and substituted half the cream cheese in the frosting for peanut butter. The result was divine. You can taste the beets faintly but I think it pairs well with chocolate. The beets make the cake rich and moist.
This is ultimately not a “red” velvet cake but the red is just food coloring nor flavor. I will be serving this beet cake at my next party!
All you need to do to make the old fashioned velvet cake red is to use 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate, 2 teaspoons of cocoa powder, and 1 oz of red food coloring. No beets! My cake turned out splendid! I actually sell them.
I can’t get the link to your new and improved recipe to work. Help!
Hi Marius,
you have buttermilk. use Kefir. You can find it in almost any market in the dairy section.
My boyfriend is allergic to red food coloring so I wanted to make him a Red Velvet Cake that did not use this ingredient. The recipe for Traditional Red Velvet Cake (made with beets) made the best chocolate cake my friends and I have ever had. It was moist, good texture, and tasted fantastic! However, it was brown, not red. The next time I made it, I left out the unsweetened chocolate to see if the red from the beets would be more prominant. The cake turned out brown with a tinge of red. I’m thinking that’s the best result I can get without using food coloring. I will be using both versions of this recipe in the future.
I have tried and tried… too many times to make this cake.
Several times using this recepie, with slight variations, and several times using other recepies thats nearly identical.
It doesnt work. This recepie simply does not work. Either its something completely different with american ingredients than Norwegian, or theres something incomplete about the recepie.
I´ve done it EXACTLY like it says here… what I end up with is a little heavy and compact cake thats not much thicker than one layer. It doesnt taste good either. Infact, it just tastes flour and water, and perhaps some sugar.
Im totally unable to learn how to make this cake. And thats wierd because Im a darn good chef!
HI marius,
Norwegian ingredients are different. I am american but I lived in Oslo for five years, got used to baking there, and when i returned to the states everything turned out badly. I think there is a difference in ingredients, altitude and perhaps some other factors I have not thought of. Now I am as good at baking as before Iiving in Norway. It did take some time to re-adjust. If you want to make american recipes, read “Min Far, Som Heter Daddy”. It is a cookbook written by a half norwegian guy for norwegians who want to try american food.
Overall, I think the quality of flour in norway is amazing. I really miss the bread there. I used to love making roisenboller. Nam! I hope you get to read this. Good luck :)
The problem might be your cocoa. Most cocoa in Europe is Dutch processed which neutralizes the acids in it. Because this recipe calls for baking soda, the chemistry just might now work out right which would make your cake fall flat. I would suggest adding two parts cream of tartar for one part baking soda and see how that goes.
I made this cake for Valentine’s Day and it was amazing! My fiance thinks this is about the best dessert I’ve ever baked and I will definitely be making it again.
A few thoughts: there were no instructions on how to cook the beets. I roasted mine, which I have done in the past, because I was worried that if I boiled them they would lose color into the water. Make sure they are really well cooked and soft, otherwise they are difficult to puree.
Also, I didn’t pay enough attention to the quantity of confectioner’s sugar needed for the frosting: 5-6 CUPS. I didn’t have enough, so I used granulated sugar, about 3-4 cups. This made a delicious frosting, but it never set quite right. Confectioner’s sugar has a small amount of cornstarch in it, which helps the frosting to stiffen, so you really want to use that, or toss in a little cornstarch if you use granulated sugar.
My cake did not turn out red at all. We think this is because I used Dutched cocoa. Apparently the chemical reaction of un-Dutched cocoa with the vinegar lends the cake a reddish color in the traditional recipes.
All in all, a fabulous, rich cake.
Interesting comments- I was looking for a naturally-colored red velvet cake made from beets, and found this information about the color of the cake based on a reaction of the cocoa powder available before dutch-processing, and the acidity of the buttermilk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_velvet_cake
Happy baking!
Im sorry to say that this recepie is not good enough.
Marye, thanks for teaching me how to make buttermilk. Im gonna use that alot in the future with american recepies. But there is too much oil in this recepie. It doesnt taste good.
Can you replace the buttermilk with something else? We dont have that here.
Hi,
Could you tell me what is a cup in grams??
Thank you
The beet recipe did turn out too dark, but delicious. It tastes like red velvet cake, definitely, it just doesn’t look red at all. I’m not sure how that happened as the batter did have a reddish hue to it once the beets were added. I will say it was a little disappointing to have gone to the effort of cooking, peeling, and pureeing beets only to get none of the desired color effect. Perhaps less of the melted chocolate or none at all would take care of this? I am not sure how much the flavor would suffer, but it does seem like the darknes of the chocolate is just too much for the beets to show. I’ll most likely try that next time I need a red velvet cake. This recipe does taste great, and I really like the use of beets as an alternative to food coloring. I know my girlfriend will still enjoy this on Valentine’s Day despite the color!
YAY! Thank you Ann. Since someone else had had trouble I wondered if I was doing something different. Good to know. whew!
please don’t pull the recipe out, it turned out DELICIOUS ;)
because i was using larger pans, i had to wait a little longer, but it was so0o0 moist and tasty, my family loved it too. it wasn’t too sweet, and i had used an icing with cream& mascarpone cheese (taken from joyofbaking.com), but next time i’ll definitely try the cream cheese frosting with the cake made from actual beets. i’m excited to try give that a whirl.
thank you Marye for your recipes :)
I am comparing mine with the one from food network and not seeing much difference.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sara-moulton/southern-red-velvet-cake-recipe/index.html
Ann,
I haven’t had trouble but if you do let me know and I will pull the recipe. I can’t figure out what I am doing differently. Grrrr. :(
I’m baking it as we speak (the first recipe)
and after 40mins, the cake does seem liquidy.
although I am aware that I should be leaving it in for a little longer because I’m using bigger pans,
maybe it’s also because of use of oil instead of butter?
I’ll come back a little later to follow up on how the cake turned out
1190 days ago
[...] http://www.globalgourmet.com/food/specia... Traditional Red Velvet Cake Recipe ( made with beets) http://www.bakingdelights.com/2008/02/13... CHOCOLATE BEET CAKE http://straightfromthefarm.net/2007/06/2... Some say red velvet cake [...]