I’ve been pretty lazy with blogging lately but I’m going to make it up with not one but three blog posts today, I don’t like to do things by halves, haha. Anyways I decided to try out another flavour for my friend’s wedding cake over Easter, purple velvet cake. Thanks to Google I soon discovered that there weren’t many recipes for purple velvet cake, the one I did find had yam powder in it which doesn’t sound like an easy ingredient to find in Ireland. I decided I’d make a red velvet cake and put in purple food colouring instead of red, surely that would work right?!
I found a Jamie Oliver recipe for red velvet cake that looked easy enough and off I went. http://www.jamieoliver.com/news-and-features/features/how-to-make-red-velvet-cake/
I preheated the oven to 180C and greased two 8″ cake tins, you can use three tins for this recipe too.
I sifted 250g plain flour, 1 ¼ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda and 40g cocoa powder into a big bowl. I poured 240ml vegetable oil into a bowl along with 300g golden granulated sugar and mixed it with a freestanding mixer until it was pale.
I added in 2 large eggs, one at a time followed by 2 tbsps of purple food colouring and ½ tbsp of vanilla extract . At this point the cake batter began to look like something out of Willa Wonka’s factory or something the Cookie Monster would eat, ha.
Next step was to spoon in 1/3 of the dry ingredients and mix well, it was at this point I realised I hadn’t done the coffee. So the next 15 minutes went by in a blur of speed coffee making and cooling. I made 200ml of coffee and put it into the fridge then the freezer to cool. I mixed in 240ml of buttermilk into it. I read over the recipe again and cursed, it was supposed to be 100ml of coffee. Off I went to repeat the whole rigmarole once again and I finally had the coffee and buttermilk mixture, at least I wouldn’t have too much of the carton of milk leftover anyways.
Anyyyyyways, after adding in 1/3 of the dry mixture I stirred in half of the coffee/buttermilk mixture and stirred in half of what was left of the dry ingredients. I stirred in ½ tbsp of white wine vinegar into the remaining buttermilk mixture and poured it in, followed by the rest of the flour.
Once all ingredients were combined I poured it into the two tins and popped it into the oven for about 40 minutes. Once I took it out of the oven I realised that it was more of a reddish/chocolate type of velvet cake rather than a purple velvet cake.
While the cake was cooling I made the cream cheese icing by beating 175g of unsalted butter until pale, I added in 400g of icing sugar in stages and mixed it together.
I spooned in a tablespoon of the 300g of full-fat cream cheese, I scraped down the sides of the icing with a spatula and then added in half of the cream cheese, mixed it together for half a minute and then mixed in the rest of it. Next came the decorating part.
I spread a teaspoon of icing on the stand and put one of the cakes on top of it. I spread the icing on top of the cake and added the next layer. I covered both cakes with the icing.
I added in some purple food colouring to the rest of the icing to make up for the lack of purple in the cake and then spooned it into an icing bag. I used a plate to practice a few designs and settled on a few little rosettes on top, dots at the bottom and some writing on top. I won’t be giving up the day job just yet but it was good fun all the same.
So it wasn’t quite the colour I wanted it to be but it tasted really moist and even two days later it was lovely and moist, it disappeared fairly quickly too. 😀
Fernweh with T 