cake

I decided to start this project off right with a cake. My favorite baking book is “More From Magnolia” by Allysa Torey.

So I knew I wanted to bake a cake from this book. I settled on the Red Velvet Cake.

The recipe calls for cake flour, which I didn’t have in my pantry. I had All-Purpose and Self Rising, so I went on a search for cake flour. Giant Eagle turned up nothing, so one day after work I hit up Trader Joe’s, thinking they would probably have it. Nada. So I drove 20 miles out of my way to Whole Foods, thinking they would DEFINITELY have it. Nothing! At this point, I was starting to freak out a little, and checking the Web to see if I could substitute something else for cake flour. Finally I decided I would try Kroger’s, just to see.

Lo and behold:

Armed with my ingredients, I set to work. The next problem occurred when I noticed that the recipe called for six tablespoons of red food coloring. This is the food coloring I had on hand:

I quickly realized that one of those little bottles of food coloring is just about one tablespoon. So I would have needed six of those bottles! I used up all the red in that four pack, and then found an extra bottle of red food coloring tucked away in the pantry. But it only had about half a tablespoon in it, so I was four and a half tablespoons short. It would have to do.

I think it worked out fine:

Even after baking, the cakes stayed red:

This was a three layer cake. I only have two springform pans, so I had to bake two of the layers and then let them cool for an hour in the pans before I could bake the third layer. As you can imagine, this was an all-day affair.

I used the Creamy Vanilla Frosting the cookbook suggested, which was very interesting. It required cooking milk and flour for ten minutes, and then mixing up FOUR sticks of butter with sugar and vanilla before mixing in the milk/flour mixture. It made a ton of frosting, which I thought was going to be way too much. I underestimated how much icing it takes to frost a three layer cake.

Finally, it was time to cut into this bad boy.

I plated our slices on our new dinner plates. They tasted fantastic, although in the future, I will know to cut the slices much much thinner. We couldn’t finish our pieces!

Tune in next week when I’ll be making scones!