Red velvet

Remember my valentine cake? Made (partly) out of red velvet cake? Well, I thought it was time to try out the cake properly.
It's a funny thing with baking soda and vinegar - surely they cancel each other out?
I used this recipe for red velvet cake - which I won't repost here - from one of my favourite baking websites.
The recipe calls for pints and pints of extraordinarily rich 'creamcheese frosting'. You make two normal layers of cake, then cut each laterally in half, so you have a four layer cake. That means four layers of icing - yum, yum! Although I must confess that my appetite for gooey icing seems to have been quenched somewhat with age.

Still, it looks good with the red stripes, doesn't it?

One more valentine-ish post

The recipe for the elaborate Valentine's cake was a bit sketchy on some of the details, especially about amounts. This led to my making two layers of red velvet cake when only one was necessary and more than double the amount of cream cheese frosting.
So I had the inspired idea of slicing the second layer into two very thin layers, then using a heart-shaped cookie cutter to make lots of little heart-shaped cakes, which I then iced with the leftover cream cheese frosting. A few coloured sprinkles and you have perfect little Valentine's cakes. How's that for creative?
They made a perfect hostess gift for the delightful Sunday lunch I have just come home from (around 8pm), and were surprisingly nice. The only snag is that cream cheese frosting doesn't really harden at all, so they didn't transport perfectly and serving them was a bit messy.
And I forgot to photograph them, so you just have to imagine what they looked like.

Valentine cake

It's a little different from the Bakerella version. For a start, it's not as perfect or pretty. I'm not a perfectionist, which means that what I do is rarely to a very high standard. On the other hand, I do a lot of things, even if sometimes they are a bit slapdash.
Another excuse for its less than perfect appearance is that I used marzipan instead of fondant to make the cardboard box. I've never worked with fondant, so it may well be easier to manage, but the marzipan was very soft after kneading in the food colouring. While on the topic of food colouring, neither the cake nor the marzipan came out as red as suggested. I think Green & Black's cocoa may be darker than standard American cocoa, so it overrode the redness. The food colouring itself seems to come out pink rather than red - the whole concoction used a bottle and a half of food colouring!

Ambitious plans

I have very ambitious plans for a Valentine's day cake. Before you get all upset, I should reassure you that I haven't gone all soppy and conventionally romantic. This is pure self-indulgence as I take on a patisserie challenge. The Man will eat at most two or three slices, but if it works, I'll make it again the following week for a friends' wedding.
Anyway, the idea comes from a random blog, (I don't want to put up a picture because I don't want to follow that - you'll see my version first!), and it's based on an American recipe (as above) called red velvet cake. I've made the base cake and it smells gorgeous and looks very nice, but it's sort of dark chocolatey red rather than the scarlet of all the pictures. Despite two tablespoons of red food colouring!