Two-tiered red velvet cake

(Hover over the image to see how it turned out!) I'm an extraordinarily awful cake decorator, but don't let the sloppy frosting job fool you: this cake is really good!

Notes

This recipe calls for gel food colouring. I used liquid, and as you can see, the colours in the final cake are pretty muted whereas they'll be a lot brighter if you use gel. It's up to you which you choose!

Ingredients

For the cake:

280 g flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

13 g cocoa powder

350 g sugar

2 eggs

172 g oil

120 g milk

30 g white vinegar

10 g vanilla extract

2 tsp. gel food colouring (or as many drops of red liquid food colouring as you think you need)

240 g hot milk

56 g melted butter

For the frosting (note: this is an estimation because I did it by eye; you can adjust the amounts according to your own tastes):

400 g cream cheese

200 g butter

100 g sugar

A pinch of salt

A pinch of vanilla extract

Materials

2 9- or 8-inch cake pans

Directions

Aggressively grease the pans with butter to make sure the cake comes out without sticking. You can add parchment paper as a liner if you want, but I didn't. Preheat the oven at 330°F.

Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cocoa powder, and sugar into a bowl and whisk them all together to make your dry ingredient mixture. Set aside.

In a different bowl, add the eggs, oil, milk (120 g cold, not hot), white vinegar, vanilla extract, and food colouring (enough that the mixture is a pretty bright red). Whisk together to make your wet ingredient mixture.

In portions, add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix until smooth.

Heat the 240 g of milk and 56 g of butter in a saucepan, mixing periodically. Heat until reaching a gentle simmer — don't boil! Add half to the batter and mix it in before adding the remaining half. Mix the whole thing.

Divide the batter in halves and pour into your pans. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the top bounces back when lightly tapped and the toothpick comes out largely clean from the center.

While it bakes, make your frosting. Again, I made mine by eye — you can follow the original recipe's instructions, but it calls for different ingredients and measurements. I blended the cream cheese, added the butter and mixed that, too, and then added the rest of the ingredients and mixed until it was all combined.

Once the cake's out of the oven, set them aside to cool before removing them from the pans. Let them cool completely, and only decorate then. If you want, you can trim the top of the cake to make it totally flat and use those crumbs as a cake topping (bake them again for a few minutes if so). Refridgerate!

Credits

Pastry Living.