When your birthday falls so close to the holidays, you need something extra special to celebrate. A friend of ours with just such a birthday requested these red velvet cupcakes from Garrett McCord, guest blogger on Simply Recipes, and we wholeheartedly complied!
Red velvet cake is one of those classic American desserts with vague Southern origins - no one seems to know the exact birthplace. It's basically yellow cake made with buttermilk and just dash of cocoa powder for deeper flavor. The red color traditionally comes from boiled beets, but these days most of us use red food dye.
Garrett's cupcake version was just fantastic. The batter came together quickly and easily. We'd definitely recommend sifting the dry ingredients as she instructs; we opted for whisking instead and ended up with a few clumps from the cake flour.
Despite our troubles with the silicone baking liners, the cupcakes received an enthusiastic (if sticky) thumbs up from our birthday girl and other party-goers. The cake was soft in texture and incredibly tender - dare we say "velvety"?! We loved the grown-up flavor from these cupcakes. The sugary sweetness was tempered by all the acidic ingredients, giving these cakes a lot more complexity than just straight-forward yellow cake.
And can we just talk about that frosting for a second? It's seriously good. Of course, a block of cream cheese beaten with a stick of butter and a healthy portion of powdered sugar will do that to you. We were afraid it might taste greasy or strangely buttery, but instead it just tasted rich and sweet with just the balance of tang from the cream cheese.
We had to send the leftover cakes home with our guests for fear that we'd eat them all as soon as the door closed. Still, we probably won't have to wait too long until finding a new excuse to make another batch!
• Get the Recipe: Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting from Garrett McCord at Simply Recipes
Related: Good Tip: Freezing Leftover Buttermilk
(Images: Emma Christensen)
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Yay! I'm so glad you liked the recipe. =)
-Garrett
These photos are literally making me salivate. I wish I wasn't such a baked goods sucker. *bookmarked for after winter trip to florida!* haha
I just licked my screen. Usually only do that on Manhunt! ;)
Mmmmmm, stop! You had me at "deeper flavor"! ;)
Has anyone ever tried the boiled frosting for red velvet cake? I have always wanted to try it and never quite had the occasion to make one yet. I'm afraid to make this at home with nowhere to go, because I know I'll eat the entire thing!
yes please!! I am flagging this for later.
Anyone have a recipe that *doesn't* use red food coloring? If boiled beets were to be used as a substitute, how much would be needed?
My birthday is mere days after Christmas, and whilst I had a strawberry mousse cake for my actual birthday, I am having a belated party next week and am having red velvet cake- indeed when your birthday is near Christmas you do need a little something special!
My daughter usually has red velvet cake and cupcakes for her birthday (with a name like "Tallulah" it seems the most fitting somehow... ;-)).
We used this recipe last year for the cupcakes, and it was great. It is now my basic recipe for red velvet cake, as it is butter-, as opposed to oil-, based. One word of advice is that make sure you use the flavourless red food colouring, which you can find online, as regular red gel food colouring can be a bit bitter, and you *do* use a lot of it!
For an interesting variation on red velvet cake, check out the one by the Lee Brothers. Theirs isn't the typical light cake, but rather a butter cake. And the flavouring is orange and chocolate. It got rave reviews when I made it!
http://mattleeandtedlee.com/lee-bros/recipes/red-velvet-cake/
I play with the recipes every year... One thing to play with, is to use natural (*not* Dutch-process) cocoa, as that will result in a lighter, and thus much brighter red cake, instead of the sometimes mahogany colour you get when you use Dutch-process cocoa.
So glad you liked the recipe! I shouldn't be the one given credit for it though. Garrett McCord of http://vanillagarlic.com is the creator of that cupcake, which he wrote about on Simply Recipes.
dzaks - Just don't put in the red food coloring. Yes, it won't be "red" velvet cake. Just call it gold velvet cake, and feel better that you're not eating a bunch of dye. It's what I always do.
My girl is a New Year's Eve baby and red velvet with cream cheese frosting it is for her party. She's half Japanese, and red and white are the New Year colors there, so it's perfect visually, too.
This year I didn't use enough food coloring and got a deep pink cake. Still completely delicious and no complaints from a bunch of little girls.
These look sooo yummy. I love red velvet, my favorite cupcake flavor.
I've made these cupcakes several times - thank you Garrett! - and they're always a hit. I have never been able to find cake flour, though, so I just remove about two tablespoons of all-purpose flour, and they bake up beautifully.
The boiled frosting, while more authentic to the original red velvet cake, has a flavor that is quite bland and flat. Literally, it tastes like sugar paste with absolutely no character to it.
This recent wave of Red Velvet love has come with the cream cheese icing as the main companion to the decadent red cake, and having experienced them both (and my entire family is from the south, by the way, where red velvet was supposed to have originated), I am very heavily in favor of the cream cheese icing as opposed to the original boiled roux frosting.