Fact: Valentine's Day Requires Red Cake

In honor of this weekend's Valentine's Day festivities, I'm linking the IWICQYTB up to another blog for a fun and info filled primer on making Red Velvet Cupcakes. Dear friend Andrea has a fantastic food blog called "Alphabeet Soup" and recently posted a video we shot discussing how to make Red Velvet Cake, Cupcakes, and Whoopie Pies. We used two pretty normal modern recipes for the first 2 batches and then a third that used beets for its coloring. They all turned out really well, although the one with beets had a flavor like, well, beets, and almost went more of a savory cake direction. Good, but different.

One final note: 2 of the recipes, like almost every recipe you'll see now, did use red coloring to bring out the coloration. Way back when, you might not have needed to because the cocoa didn't undergo a treatment called "Dutch Process" and so it kept more of the natural cocoa coloration, yielding a sort of brick color. For a long time though, cocoa producers have done this Dutch Process which makes the cocoa a little more alkaline (less acidic) and darker brown, but also better tasting. So that's why now we have to add the red coloring. Keep in mind also that the old way of making this in the pre-Dutch Process era didn't have that Canadian Flag red we see now.

The Link:

http://alphabeetsoup.blogspot.com/2010/02/red-velvet-bake-off.html