Let them eat Red Velvet Cake

I confess I am not much of a cook. It’s just not my thing. But I do enjoy baking on occasion. I used to do it a lot more than I have lately. There was a time when my rhubarb pies brought all the boys to the bake sale.

Yesterday was Emma’s 14th birthday and she was having a party. We took her out for breakfast and stopped at one of those hipster cupcake shops and they had a display full of red velvet cupcakes (at $3 each! Ouch.) She decided she’d really just like a nice Red Velvet cake instead. While at the grocery store picking up other party food I quickly used my phone to  Google a recipe and picked up the few ingredients I needed. Steve thought I should just grab a box mix and call it good. But I wanted to do something special. And really making a cake from scratch isn’t all that more difficult than using a mix and the results are so much better. I did have to make a second trip to the store because I didn’t have red food coloring at home like I thought I did and I decided that a nice cake deserved better cake pans than the old rusty ones we were giving over 20 years ago for wedding gifts so I picked up 3 new heavy duty non-stick 9” pans.

I used a recipe from the Food Network website: Paula Deen's Red Velvet Cake I can’t praise this recipe enough. It is moist, delicious and really, really RED! Some RVC I’ve seen turn out more reddish brown than a true red. I made a modified cream cheese frosting using 1/3 low fat cream cheese because that is what I had on hand. It was tasty and delicious and not too soft. All of Emma’s guests loved it and I was positive I would find an empty cake stand this morning when I got up but they did leave a few pieces. I had one for breakfast and it was just as good 12 hours later as it was fresh.