how not to bake a cake

Red Velvet Cake is one of life’s great mysteries (to me). It has an unpinpointable taste that makes it impossible to describe what kind of cake it is. I don’t think it’s chocolatey enough to be chocolate, and it’s not a butter cake, nor a sponge cake, nor a pound cake. Also, it owes its renown pretty much entirely to red food colouring, which is ridiculous considering that you could red-food-colour almost any other cake you want. You could even have a red cheesecake if that floats your scarlet-loving boat. And as Deb of Smitten Kitchen (where I got this recipe) points out, red velvet cake could be any other colour you want, so this red thing is really kind of mindboggling.

But, as is also observed by Deb, people loooove red velvet cake. I freely admit to feeling an inexplicable attraction towards it, even when I know that this is an attraction borne entirely of artificial colouring. People especially love it when it is baked in cupcake form. Here in the UK, I suspect this is due to the famed Hummingbird Bakery’s version of it (they do do a cake form but I far more often hear people talk about their red velvet cupcakes). And as I was after an impressive dessert recipe for my colleagues to commemorate my last days of work at my current theatre, I decided I should finally give red velvet cake a go. I shan’t reproduce the recipe here because I pretty much used the one from Smitten Kitchen word for word (except for some quanitity adjustments for a smaller cake), but I shall have a good long rant about the painstaking process that is cake-baking…

Which segues nicely to how not to bake a cake, point 1: when a recipe tells you to lump some butter in the bottom of your pan and place pan in oven “for a few minutes until butter melts”, don’t let your butter burn, as I rather stupidly did! If you, like me, associate the smell of burnt butter with popcorn and movies, this will make your cake smell of popcorn and movies. And taste a little like it too (the bits of it that came into contact with the burnt butter bottom, anyway). Point 2: when the recipe says to line your pan with parchment paper, there’s probably a reason for it… it would’ve made my cake NOT taste like popcorn, at the very least >__>

I also struggled almightily with the components of the recipe itself. Who has 3 cake tins lying around? Seriously? Well I don’t… and on top of that, the UK doesn’t contain cake flour, canola oil or white vinegar. Cake flour I can understand because I’ve never heard of it in my life, but canola oil and white vinegar definitely exist in Singapore (the oil at least I’m sure of!), so what gives, London? I wound up reducing the recipe by one-third and making it one fat layer instead of a few, then slapping all the frosting on top of my one fat layer, and using vegetable oil in place of canola, the latter of which turned out to be an icky mistake :/ it’s not as disastrous as it could’ve been. But there’s definitely a strange, lingering, oily aftertaste to the cake. Argh! Next time I shall try it with rapeseed oil instead, which is apparently the closest thing the UK has to canola (and I didn’t bother doing this research before going out grocery shopping, because I had no idea canola oil didn’t exist here… annoying country differences).

In the absence of a standing electric mixer with a bowl that the recipe called for, I had to make do with a handheld mixer instead. I don’t think it really made a difference in the end, but I did find myself having to juggle a lot more things at one go. Oh and I had no white vinegar. Did I mention that already? I highly doubted that malt vinegar would be quite the same, so I substituted lemon juice, which… I suspect wasn’t strong enough because the expected tangy taste is barely there at all. I suppose it is quite possible that my lemon juice, being Tesco house brand, is of substandard quality.

And then! After all was done and the cake was in the oven, and I had washed up and wiped the table and was feeling good about it all, I realised to my horror that I had forgotten to add vanilla to the cake. Cue panic removal of the cake pan from oven, throwing in vanilla, and mixing it up in the pan itself, totally ignoring the fact that it had started to bake and bits of crusty top were forming. Alas. I don’t know if this really affected the cake much, but I would rather advise that you not do it if possible to avoid…!

Happily, it didn’t turn out all disastrously – the middle of the cake (i.e. everywhere that didn’t touch the popcorny burnt-butter sides and bottom) actually tastes pretty good. If you, erm, try to ignore the faint oily aftertaste. And the cream cheese frosting is golden. This is hands down the best frosting I have ever made in my life. Not that I’m very experienced at frosting, but this is really, really good, and so easy; I’m definitely nicking the same frosting for other cakes!

My last day of work at the current place isn’t till next week. I had deliberately made an early trial run of this cake with the idea in mind that I would definitely screw up and need a second run to perfect it for my colleagues T____T I can’t decide whether I’m happy or not to have been proven right. But at least it doesn’t taste so terrible that I can’t eat it. And now that you all know what not to do when making red velvet cake, you can all have a good laugh at me and hopefully go off and make lots of lovely red velvet cake yourselves with Smitten Kitchen’s fantastic recipe, which I can sample in future ♥