Thursday, February 25, 2010

Red Velvet Disaster

There must be a kitchen gremlin in the house today... that's the only explanation for the luck I had tonight. At around 5:00, I had a huge craving to bake. What better, I thought, than some red velvet cake? So I set out downstairs to stake out the ingredients. Of course, we have the regulars, flour, eggs, milk, sugar, vanilla. It'll be fine. At around this time, I get the go ahead to make dinner, so I start that too. Spaghetti and meat sauce with broccoli, to be precise. Just FYI, burned the broccoli, spilled pasta water all over the kitchen. Success.

Naturally, I care more about the cake, so I'm looking at the recipe and sad to see we don't have any red food coloring. Well, I thought, who needs red velvet cake to be red? Not I. So, I continued on. Here is the recipe I used:
Cake:
• 1 cup vegetable shortening
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon cocoa powder
• 2 ounces red food coloring
• 2 1/2 cups cake flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• White frosting, recipe follows
White Frosting:
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup unsalted butter
• 1 cup confectioners' sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

In the bowl of a mixer, cream together the shortening, eggs and sugar. In a separate small bowl, mix together the cocoa and food coloring. Add the paste to the shortening mixture. Sift the flour and salt together over parchment. Add to the batter alternately with the buttermilk in 3 additions. (Looks red velvet-y right? ha.)
 Add the vanilla extract. Fold in the baking soda and vinegar. Pour the batter into 2 greased 9-inch cake pans. Bake for 30 minutes or until an inserted cake tester comes out clean. Let cool on a cooling rack. Invert the cakes from the pans.

Frosting: Over medium heat, cook the flour and milk until thickened. Let cool. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Beat in the flour mixture.

Frost the top of the first layer with frosting and set the second layer on top. Frost the entire cake with remaining frosting. 


Here are the ingredients we DIDN'T have: red food coloring, cake flour, buttermilk, vanilla extract. So... you can see where I'm going with this. I found substitutes for the cake flour and buttermilk... success! I didn't, however, find a substitute for the food coloring, nor the vanilla. For the food coloring, I just mixed the cocoa powder (we only had dark) with water. For vanilla extract, I used rum extract. So... you can imagine this disaster. I put my cake in the oven and 30 minutes later, the kitchen smells decent so I'm scott free! False. The middle was runny. Turns out, the kitchen gremlin pre heated the oven to 300, not 350... what a jerk. So, I turned it back up, cooked it 10 more minutes, and moved onto the frosting. At this point, I did the only thing I knew to make anything taste better... ditch their frosting and make my own dark chocolate frosting. Oh. My. Gosh. So tasty! I ended up just spooning frosting out of the bowl, yum. Tummy ache? Yes. So I tried the cake... ended up halfway okay. The frosting saved it.

I totally, totally butchered this recipe, and at the end of the day, the result was okay because I dipped some girl scout cookies in frosting and made a delicious option to the cake, with milk. Yummo. I'm so full now... I haven't had sweets all week and I over did it tonight because I had two of these little cookie creations and some cake :-/ OOPS. Oh well! I guess that's the beauty of working at a gym.. I can work it off tomorrow.

In less exciting news, here was breakfast and dinner. I didn't take a picture of lunch. Breakfast was just some tasty oatmeal, golden raisins, and slivered almonds. Dinner, as aforementioned, was spaghetti, broccoli and salad. I'm so so so full now! All my blunders today make sense. I also accidentally left the door cracked in a dressing room today and because I forgot a change of undergarments after my shower at work, I had nothing! You get the idea. I also forgot shorts to work out in, but borrowed Susies. Thank God tomorrow is Friday! Oye... time to roll upstairs and finish some work. Ta ta.

2 comments:

Rick said...

Red velvet can be tricky. Lucky for you, it is my specialty.

Jessie said...

You'll have to give me YOUR recipe. Any maybe I should actually buy the ingredients before I attempt making it, right? Such a novel idea.