A futile attempt to cook the perfect red velvet cake



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The reason I started making cakes was that I did not want to give my son the processed and packaged variety. He ate very well, but slices of cake in his tiffin meant that he would come back without crumbs. Now, as a person who likes to read the list of ingredients – and read on it – I was not proud of what I was feeding it. And that's why the self-made cake has made its appearance.

I like that my concepts are clear – the research involved is my favorite part – so I went on an internet hunt to discover the recipe for the perfect bread cake, not too sweet but nutritious and nourishing. A few days later, I had found a way to evaluate millions of online recipes: work, flop and worthy of being tested.

The tests and tasting were mostly fun, although there were some disasters – a cake without eggs made with custard was inedible. And some blockbusters – the peanut butter cake for example, which, according to people, came from a bakery.

One thing was sure, my love story with the pastry had taken off. So much so that I even chose a name – Bare Cakes – for the bakery I dreamed of having one day or the other. Stripped because I did not want to make refined iced cakes, but healthy, fluffy and mellow cakes, too delicious to dress. I refused to spend precious time smothering my cakes in fluffy whipped cream, a butter cream too sweet or a fondant nice but tasteless – these flowers are pretty but you can not eat them.

And then I came across the red velvet cake in his creamy, extremely photogenic icecream frosting coat and the uncrowned king of Instagram.

A red velvet requires glitter and icing clouds. As if that were not enough, you also need a bottle of vanilla food coloring. Yes, that's what gives it this dazzling shade – not a particular chemistry between buttermilk and cocoa powder. I was actually quite sorry when I learned the recipe. Tempting, yes. In good health? Not far away.

A red velvet cake
A red velvet cake Thinkstock

Still, I ended up cooking a lot of red velvet cupcakes for my first bake sale. I have each surmounted a rosette of white chocolate ganache, which tastes as good as it looks in it.

Well, what do you know, red velvet cupcakes were the first to sell. Not the sour-sweet scented gondhoraj lemon cupcakes that I'd racked my brains, any more than the unusual chocolate-chili decadent brownies, not even the orange-orange chocolate vegan cupcakes topped with chocolate ganache, that I've tweaked dozens of times until perfect. And some people have actually chosen red velvet after a taste. And yet, when I bit into one of those bright red orbs, it looked like a simple vanilla cake. He did not taste the red, but just white and the most disappointing.

If I want to feed people with a bottle of chemicals, it would be better if it were delicious. So back, I went to the cooking blog that excites me, and of course, there was a recipe. It required more chocolate, less color and a magical combination of vinegar and baking soda. The measurements were all in fractions and I hate maths. Normally, I would keep a recipe as pernicious at arm's length, but the desire to make a delicious red velvet will be winning.

The cake was elastic, slightly acidic and tasted the velvety red. Now, if only I could replace this bottle of chemicals with something natural. A few more hours on the Internet have led to a possible replacement: a beetroot. I roasted the root vegetable for an hour and a half, mashed it and prepared the difficult recipe. The cake went into the burgundy oven but came out of a chocolate rose. I've increased the amount of red beet in the dough and this has turned into a faded red mud pie instead of a cake. Exhausted, I sprinkled a white chocolate ganache and I served it to the guests, claiming all the time that it was a mud pie that I wanted to prepare. I've also benefited because it's a time when everything is perfumed with red velvet – from hot chocolate to biscuits and sandwiches!

But let's go back to the drawing board and I rushed. And this time, I tried raw grated beets. The cake has always remained a faded red. No more grated beets. Another mud pie. In addition, he had the distinct taste of making beets.

"Can I have a red velvet cake for my birthday," asked my daughter. A long, deep breath and I persuaded her to talk about a pretty heart-shaped rose, strawberry-flavored. "Just what is best for little girls," I argued and I won. I'm fed up with fussy red velvet cakes that never quite keep their promise.

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