Classic Red Velvet Cake! Tender red cake layers with a hint of chocolate paired with a tangy cream cheese frosting and a red velvet crumble.
Red Velvet Cake is one of those classic recipes that get requested over and over. That rich red color is stunning and paired with a cream cheese frosting, you can’t really go wrong.
I love learning the history behind timeless recipes like this, to find out how they originated, how they became popular, and how they have changed over the years.
Of course, I feel the need to share that with you, so sit back for another quick history lesson — or skip ahead to How To Make Red Velvet Cake.
What is Red Velvet Cake?
Originally, back in the 1800’s, the color of the cake was due to non-Dutched anthocyanin-rich cocoa, which reacted with the vinegar and buttermilk in the recipe to create a rich red/maroon color.
These days, even standard cocoa powder from the grocery store has gone through some level of Dutch processing, which strips some of the acid and prevents the color change from happening (at least to the extent that it used to).
To compensate, recipes these days use a LOT of red coloring (usually in liquid form) to get that bright or rich red color.
The cake’s rise to popularity actually came about during the Great Depression. A company called Adams Extract created the Red Velvet Cake recipe we know today as a marketing tactic, in hopes of boosting sales in a difficult time.
Their recipe uses shortening (which is cheaper than butter), Adams butter flavoring, Adams vanilla, and of course, Adams red food coloring. Adams gave out the recipe for free on recipe cards at grocery stores, and it quickly became a hit in households all across the country.
Fellow Canadians will appreciate this: apparently the red velvet cake was a staple at Eaton’s department stores in the 40’s and 50’s. Except that they claimed the recipe to be their own. Poor form, Eaton’s!
If you’ve been following Liv for Cake for a while now, you know that I prefer to stick with natural flavors and colors as much as possible.
I have the occasional bright cake where the flavors just call for a pop of color, but I try to utilize natural colorants like freeze-dried powder to give some of the coloring. Making a Red Velvet Cake was never high on my radar because of this.
I’ve tweaked and improved that recipe in hopes of darkening the cake more with cocoa powder than with coloring. I succeeded… somewhat.
The reality is, if you want a deep red color you just need to add artificial coloring to it. I know some people have used beets to try and achieve the red color, but that just didn’t appeal to me (even though I love beets).
How to Make Red Velvet Cake
Making this red velvet cake is fairly straightforward — except in my kitchen, where things tend to go wrong 90% of the time.
I was in a bit of a rush (common these days) and my butter wasn’t quite room temperature yet. I decided to cube it and try to beat it anyhow, in hopes that the friction would warm it up. Well, what it actually did was totally break my KitchenAid paddle.
This is actually the second time this has happened, for this exact same reason. Apparently I don’t learn from my mistakes. It’s because I have the memory of a goldfish, and I just didn’t remember until it happened again.
The paddle I use automatically scrapes the bowl for me (which is a HUGE time saver), but it’s plastic and clearly fragile. KitchenAid makes a metal one with a scraper, but it’s not available for my model. Why this isn’t available for all models is beyond me, and why on earth is it not standard?
Who wants to scrape the bowl? Ever??
I had no choice now. I tossed out the butter I had in the bowl in case there were any plastic fragments in it, and resorted to using my stock paddle and scraping the bowl by hand.
My plastic scraper paddle has made me so lazy. I did a terrible job of manually scraping the bowl, even though I did it like 4-5 times throughout the process (huge pain in the butt). W
hen I was pouring the cake batter into the tins, there were visible sections of unincorporated butter and sugar (lol). Needless to say, this showed in my baked layers, and one of them sagged a bit on one side.
Do better than I do, people!
Anyhow, as I was saying, making this Red Velvet Cake is pretty simple — cream your butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, etc. The key thing is that you want to add your cocoa powder and red coloring before you start adding your flour.
If you attempt to color your batter at the very end, once all the ingredients are added, you will most likely overmix your batter, resulting in a less-than-perfect dense (and sometimes fragile) cake.
This is true for all cakes that use the creaming method, so I always recommend coloring before adding the flour and milk.
You want to add the coloring in right after your eggs and keep adding it until it’s a deep shade of red. This took about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a 0.75oz bottle of Americolor Super Red color gel. I didn’t measure it, I just kept adding until I had what looked like the right color.
You can use liquid red food coloring if you prefer — you’ll need anywhere from 1-2oz of this. But I like that the color gels are more concentrated and you use less of them.
The Americolor ones also are better at not leaving a strange after-taste like some food coloring does.
Red Velvet Crumble
A quick note about the crumble on top. I made this because I wanted something to decorate the top with, and I didn’t just want to use cake crumbs. Plus I never have any since my cake layers bake up flat every time.
The crumble was a HUGE pain in the butt to make. I attempted to make it from scratch, but after 5 total fails, I gave up and opted for cake mix. After 5 more attempts I finally had something close to what I had envisioned.
I had planned to use this between the cake layers for some crunch, but I didn’t love the flavor of it, so I just used it on the top as a decorative element. It is completely optional!
What truly makes the red velvet cake, I think, is the combination of the cake with the cream cheese frosting. It is truly a unique and delicious flavor pairing. A piece or two of this cake may have quickly disappeared shortly after I took the pictures.
If you’re a Red Velvet fan, I hope you will love my tweaked version of this classic cake recipe!
Looking for more Classic Cake Recipes?
- Classic Hummingbird Cake
- Vanilla Cake With Vanilla Buttercream
- Classic Chocolate Cake
- Coconut Cake
- Black Forest Cake
This post was originally published on 02/14/19 and was updated with new content on 02/06/23.
