Growing
up in the south Red Velvet Cake is pretty much the birthday cake, it’s also one of those cakes about which
everyone has an opinion… and these opinions are never mild mannered. Generally
anyone from the South will think that anyone above or away from the Mason-Dixon
line simply doesn’t get Red Velvet
Cake and shouldn’t attempt to make it.
Red velvet cake needs cocoa, but isn’t a
chocolate cake, it needs cream cheese frosting, some say it needs some sort of
nut, most agree on pecans (I personally prefer it nut free), but the biggest
point of contention is the food coloring. Nowadays it’s mostly made with red
food coloring, and many will swear up, down and around that it’s the only way
to get the “right” color red. This seems iffy to me for a variety of reasons,
mostly because I simply cannot fathom baking anything with as much food
coloring in it as red velvet cake calls for normally and also because red
velvet cake’s been around longer than food coloring has, and it’s always been
red. Enter the beet. I definitely belong to Team Beet, not Team food coloring.
Since I had recently fixated on making a Red Velvet Cake for the Girl’s second
birthday, I searched and searched for a red velvet cake recipe with no food dye
and I found it on Sophistimom’s awesome blog.
I highly suggest you go check out
her pictures cause her cake looks fantastic. Mine tastes great and the color is
perfect but I had to make it into a specific shape for the girl’s birthday so
it’s not the beautiful three layer cake you’ll find at Sophistimom. Also, I
can’t seem to get my cream cheese frosting to stiffen enough to be able to hold
it’s own between cake layers. I’m still working on it! So for the cream cheese
frosting, I suggest you try Sophistimom’s directly and not mine (mine works
wonderfully for carrot cake though, if you’re interested!).
But the
recipe for the cake itself is awesome, and if you can get past the crazy amount
of sugar in it and the fact that you’re baking with beets you can enjoy the
most awesome Red Velvet Cake and feel no guilt about giving it to your kids or
worrying about ingesting a bunch of useless chemicals for no reason.
As usual I’ve converted almost all the measurements into grams for my European
readers. Enjoy!
This is what you need:
400grams
(1 ½ cups) pureed beets
1/4 cup freshly
squeezed lemon juice
(approx. 1 ½ lemons next time I’ll get the volume in ml)
1 tbs. white
wine vinegar
230
grams (2 sticks - 16 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened, but not quite room
temperature
230
grams (8oz.) cream cheese, softened slightly
480grams
(2 1/3 cups) raw cane sugar
- I know that’s A LOT of sugar I actually only used
400grams – 2 scant cups)
4 eggs
1 ½ tsp.
pure vanilla extract
250
grams (2 cups sifted) unbleached all-purpose flour
5 grams
(1 ½ tsp.) baking powder
3 grams
(1 tsp.) salt
30 grams
(4 tbs.) natural cocoa powder(not dark or dutch-processed)
½ tsp
cream of tartar (optional, and not in original recipe)
This is what you do:
The original recipe calls for roasting beets, but I used boiled beets
because that’s the only way I’ve managed to find them here. I buy pre-boiled,
peeled, organic beets so I don’t have to prepare them in any way. In fact, I
suggest reserving the beet juice in the package cause it makes an awesome pink
food coloring for frosting!
The original recipe also used three 8inch cake pans. But I used a
butterfly shaped cake pan and a rectangular pan for my daughter’s birthday. I
suggest using the 3 round pans though, because it makes a much more elegant,
appealing cake. Go ahead and butter and flour your pans then set aside.
Cut up your beets into large
chunks (peel them first!). Place in a food
processor with the lemon juice,
and pulse until smooth and pureed – like baby food, the smoother the better –
this may take awhile. Add the vinegar.
Cream together butter and cream cheese, add in sugar and
mix until smooth. Add in eggs, one
at a time, mixing well until each is incorporated. Mix in vanilla.
While ingredients are mixing, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and cocoa powder in a separate bowl. Slowly add flour mixture to the wet ingredients. I suggest you set your mixer on the
lowest setting and spoon the flour mixture slowly in the bowl as it tends to
become airborne if you put it in too fast!
Scrape the bowl well while mixing,
it should have the same color and consistency of chocolate mousse.
Mix the beet puree into the cake batter by hand,
making sure it’s well blended and there are no striations in the batter. Divide
the batter evenly between the cake pans. Tap pans on the counter to remove any
air bubbles – tap them well or your cake will be all holey.
Bake at 170°C (350°F)
for 20-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes
comes out clean. Cool cakes completely then wrap in saran wrap, so they stay
moist, and refrigerate (or freeze) until ready to frost.
Notes: I used about 2tbs. beet juice to color the cream cheese frosting
to decorate the cake. It came out really well, I didn’t detect any beet taste
in the frosting at all. I also used about 3tbs cocoa powder diluted in about
4tbs. hot water to color the frosting brown for the butterfly’s body. The rest
of the decorations are just various flavor jelly beans.
