Last week we had a baby shower for a coworker that will hopefully be having her baby today! In honor the baby’s arrival, here’s the cake.
It’s a red velvet cake recipe, which Rebecca (in a moment of genius) decided we should dye blue. I must confess I didn’t think it would work, but in the end it was a lovely dark blue(ish green) color!
Recipe, one that Rebecca adapted:
3 1/3 cups cake flour (not self-rising)
2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
2 1/4 cups sugar
2 eggs, 2 egg yolks, at room temperature
6 tablespoons red food coloring (or blue, if that’s what you’re in the mood for!)
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 1/2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
First, sift your flour.
Take your sugar.
And put it with your buttah.
Cream together. You can let your mixer go for five minutes. It’ll seem like forever, but definitely makes your sugar/butter light and fluffy.
Then add your eggs, one at a time.
Meanwhile stir your salt into your buttermilk.
And whisk it.
Beautiful. Time to get messy. Time to get blue. Time to do the dirty work. Time to…you get the idea.
Put your blue food coloring in a bowl with your cocoa and your vanilla. Whisk it, and add it to your bowl.
Now, this is what you have going on. You’re going to add your flour and your buttermilk, alternating. Don’t worry, the baking soda comes later. You didn’t forget it. Pat yourself on the back for not forgetting.
Blue, blue, blue. Nice work.
Here comes the science experiment. Put the apple cider vinegar and the baking soda in a bowl. Stir. It’ll fizz and make a really satisfying noise. Delightful!
Add it to the batter.
Mix well, and put into your greased, floured, and parchment paper lined cake pans.
Bake for about an hour in the oven at 350, rotating once half way through, checking at 30 minutes and 45 minutes to see if it’s done!
Meanwhile make frosting. No real recipe here – powdered sugar, butter, some vanilla.
After your cakes cool completely, ice away!
Try not to knock part of the cake off, which is what I did. Rebecca had to ice a broken cake, and she did so beautifully, I might add.
Decoration time! Can you tell what these will be? We used food coloring to dye our white frosting into a few colors…
There you have it! A baby shower cake.
Special thanks to Rebecca for providing the recipes, patience, half the photos, half the icing job, most of the flowers, the leaves, the icing gun, and basically living at my house last week.
Over, out.
[addtoany] Yum