Not So Red Velvet Cake

We were having some friends over for dinner last night so I decided to make a red velvet cake with whipped cream cheese frosting. Though this cake ended up tasting great, nothing went right from step one. First the “secret” ingredient in red velvet cake is red food coloring. If you feel completely deceived and let down, you’re not alone. All along I thought it was magical reaction the ingredients had that made the cake red, but alas it is just food coloring. Which leads me to my next question, why red? Why not blue, or purple or orange. So I’m sure in the future you will see some interestingly colored velvet cakes from me. Blue suede cake anyone? To make matters worse you need an exorbitant amount of red food coloring. I only had about half of what the recipe called for. So we got not so red velvet cake.

The frosting turned out very delicate and light. It spread on the cake like whipped cream. Problem, it never harden and the proteins from the dairy ate through the fondant. I had decorated the cake the night before and 24 hours later when we went to eat it, it was a sticky mess. But underneath the gooey fondant the frosting remained light and the cake (despite the lack of red food coloring) tasted delicious.

Even before I put the fondant on the cake I wasn’t terribly happy with the way the colors turned out. It was suppose to be an impressionistic rose garden, but it just looked like tie dye. I was basing the design off a famous design by Colette Peters (the master of everything cake). It turned out nothing like hers! Everything was a bit too dark and not shaped right. I got the fondant really thin, but it bunched and ripped at the bottom. So I put an obnoxiously large border on that just didn’t look like it fit. So I’m going to try this design again in the future and hopefully I’ll get it right. I was so disappointed with it, I almost didn’t take any pictures never the less post them. But of course the inner photographer got the best of me.