Rose Red Velvet Cake

The Rose Red Velvet Cake is one that Marie baked before the bake-along started, and I decided to try it as a mid-week cake a couple of weeks ago. A trip out of town interrupted the blogging (and the baking, thus the late show with the almond chiffon), so I'm just writing it up.








This is another one I did as a half-size. I had the able assistance of younger niece, as the cake involved chocolate. (That's only one of the triggers that can get her over to help bake.) We went with the 'add more cocoa' option and also didn't have as much red food coloring as we needed, so the result is a cake that is not nearly the dramatic red of the one in Heavenly Cakes. The color just out of the oven, in fact, can really be described as puce. (Sorry, reading Heyer has raised my awareness of puce...it's an inside joke on the Heyer list.)

Cake baked, it was on to the cream cheese/white chocolate frosting. The white chocolate met some resistance from the niece, who shares most of her family's aversion to a substance known by the blessed title of 'chocolate', but which is not. However, I overruled her, and we made the frosting as the recipe had it. Niece then wanted to attempt some piping, and landed on my old Wilton instruction book's figure piping area. She tried a mini-duck in the center of the cake, then used a flower tip for rosettes around the edge.

Verdict: this has not converted me from my opinion that red velvet cakes are all about the color. Despite the extra cocoa, it was still only mildly chocolate and the cake just didn't have a strong character. The frosting might have made the difference, but I think we sabatoged it by frosting the cake all over very thinly to have enough left over to pipe. Rose's version just spreads frosting on the top, and that probably lets the white chocolate/cream cheese flavor have more impact.