Red Velvet Cake
- Prep Time: 25
- Cook Time: 60
- Total Time: 1 hour 25 minutes
- Category: Baked; Baking; Birthday; Cakes; Desserts; Dish Type; Meals and Courses; moderate; Teatime
Description
A well-loved recipe, with a delicious twist in the tale!
Ingredients
1 ½ C (350 g) Sasko Cake Flour
1 ½ C (300 g) sugar
1 tsp (5 ml) bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp (5 ml) baking powder
4 tsp (20 ml) cocoa powder
1 tsp (5 ml) salt
1 C (250 ml) buttermilk
1½ C (375 ml) canola oil
1 tsp (5 ml) vinegar
1 tsp (5 ml) vanilla essence
red food colouring (until batter has a nice red colour, gel colouring is about 2 tsp)
2 large eggs
Cream cheese icing
100 g unsalted butter, at room temperature
200 g icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp (5 ml) vanilla essence
250 g cream cheese
Swiss Meringue topping
3 egg whites
125 g castor sugar
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 160 C. Lightly grease two cake tins with a 22 cm diameter.
Sift all the dry ingredients together into a mixing bowl.
In a separate bowl, mix the buttermilk, oil, vinegar, vanilla essence and food colouring together. Lightly beat the eggs and add them to the wet ingredients. Mix well.
Now combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients and mix until combined.
Pour the batter into the prepared cake tins and bake for 1 hour. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.
Cream cheese icing
Cream the butter and icing sugar together and add the vanilla essence. Add the cream cheese and beat together (take care not to overbeat as this causes the cream cheese to become runny).
Sandwich the cakes together with half the icing and use the other half to ice the top of the cake
Swiss Meringue topping
Separate the egg whites into a spotlessly clean metal or glass bowl.
Add the castor sugar.
Place the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (the bowl must not touch the water as you don’t want the eggs to scramble).
Whisk gently until the sugar has dissolved (you can test this by rubbing the mixture between two fingers, it should be smooth with no more sugar granules)
Remove from the heat and beat with electric beater, slowly at first, for 2 minutes and then on high speed for about 4-5 minutes until the mixture becomes glossy and stiff
Roughly pile onto the cake and smooth over with a palette knife.
The icing can be left at this stage but it looks lovely if scorched very gently with a blowtorch to caramelise the meringue.
