VampireCake

"It looks like red, but it tastes like cake!"

Recipe created by glomming a large number of recipes for red velvet cake found on the internets together.

Ingredients:

• 1 stick butter
• 1.5 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2.5 cups flour
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup ButterMilk?
• 2 oz red food coloring (ie 1/4 cup. this might be overkill, but seems to be fairly widely agreed upon...)
• 1 teaspoon vinegar
• 1 tsp baking soda

Equipment

• A largish bowl
• Two smaller bowls
• a largish spoon for mixing
• 9x13? cake pan (or combination of pans that hold a roughly equivalent amount)
• oven

Instructions

• Preheat the over to ~350 F
• Cream (ie mix until butter is soft and they are well blended) the butter and sugar together in a largish bowl (this is the bowl that all of the batter is going to end up in).
• Add the eggs one at a time mixing well after each. Mix in the vanilla.
• In a separate bowl, mix the flour, cocoa and salt.
• Measure the ButterMilk? into something that holds more than 1 cup.
• Dump the food coloring into the ButterMilk? and mix. I would suggest dumping the food coloring in slowly and swirling it and such. It is great fun to play with (but be aware that red food coloring is good at staining things). Also, it looks somewhat like a bowl of blood - hence the name of the recipe.
• Now add (1/3 of the flour mixture, 1/2 of the buttermilk, 1/2 of the remaining flour, the rest of the buttermilk, the rest of the flour) to the butter mixture mixing well after each element in the tuple.
• Butter cake pan. Put a tablespoon or two of flour into the buttered pan and tilt the pan around until it is coated with flour (you might need to add more flour). This is best done over a sink or trashcan to minimize the amount of flour that ends up on the floor.
• Mix the vinegar and baking soda. Fizzy! Stir it quickly into the batter and then dump the batter into the cake pan. With the pan sitting on a level surface shake it quickly back and forth to get the batter to even out in the pan.
• Bake at 350 F until a toothpick/knife/similar object inserted in the center comes out clean and then remove from oven.
• Cool for around 10 min and then remove from pan if desired.

Notes

• SarahFletcher would never have decided to make anything with this quantity of food coloring of her own volition. One of her friends at her REU in summer 08 wanted it for his birthday...
• Despite the food coloring, it is a tasty moist cake with just a hint of chocolate.
• It would probably be fine to leave the food coloring out and replace it with water or more buttermilk...
• The only thing making this cake red is the food coloring. This suggests that the red food coloring could be replaced with food coloring of other colors to make pretty much any color of cake...
• It goes well with CreamCheeseFrosting.