The Best Red Velvet Cake Recipe

I'm John Connell .

And today on Preppy kitchen , we're making a delicious red velvet cake .

So let's get started to make this cake .

You'll need eggs , salt butter , cocoa powder , baking soda , a little sugar , butter , milk vanilla , vinegar , red food coloring , all purpose flour , cream cheese and powdered sugar too .

Prep your pans before you get started on the batter .

So you can use baking spray a little butter and either flour them or add cocoa powder just to dust them and make sure they release really easily .

Now we're gonna start that amazing batter into a large bowl .

I'm adding 300 g or 2.5 cups of all purpose flour .

That was too much .

The nice thing about the scale is you can always take it away .

I'm adding almost a teaspoon of kosher salt and you go as well as one teaspoon of baking soda .

This is gonna react with one of the ingredients .

Later on our scale is done .

We're gonna give this a mix and just set it aside before we get our room temperature butter out into the bowl of my stand mixer .

I'm adding a cup of butter .

This is room temperature .

But I'm gonna give this a nice mix .

Any kind of darker cake like red velvet is something you're gonna notice of unmixed non scent in .

So we want the butter to be really well creamed up .

Now to that .

I'm adding 100 and 50 g or 1.5 cups of granulated sugar .

Red velvet is a classic and delicious cake .

It's one of my favorites because I love chocolate .

I love cream cheese .

It has the best of both worlds .

Traditionally , it's a light chocolate cake and I mean decades ago , it was a very light chocolate cake .

There's buttermilk cocoa powder and vinegar in it .

They have a reaction and you get a light pinkish cake .

It's like a dusty pink , very cute .

But with the advent of photography and amping things up , it's become a red cake .

Some versions don't have any chocolate in it , but I think this cake definitely needs a little kiss of chocolate .

Now we're gonna add the eggs in one at a time .

Let them incorporate in between .

There we go .

Beautiful color for me .

Not you .

So let's scrape that bowl down so you can see the yellow too .

This is why we scrape totally firm butter packed down on the bottom and it's very like watery and eggy on top .

We want a homogenous mixture the same throughout .

Mix that up until it's nice and smooth and now we can drizzle in two teaspoons of an iced vanilla .

Mm While that's mixing , I'm gonna measure out one cup of buttermilk and I'm mixing in a tablespoon of vinegar .

The vinegar of course is an acid and that's gonna give our cake a huge lift .

When the batter comes together , you're gonna see the bubbles and it's just gonna be so light and dreamy and talk about the red situation .

Like I said , historically , red velvet cake was naturally a dusty pink from the chocolate , but we're going to amp it up with a little bit of food coloring .

You can skip this and I actually like to do a little bit of red food coloring for the batter .

And then we're going to separate some batter , cook it as a cupcake , bake it as a cupcake and that's gonna get crumbled for the outside .

So it looks really dramatic without adding all the food coloring .

Let's give this a mix does not look red at all .

A little more food coloring .

There we go .

That looks pretty red right now .

It'll become less red when we add the flour and mix it with the butter and everything else .

I'm about to mix the cocoa powder into our light chocolate cake , but a word of caution .

So we're using natural cocoa powder , not Dutch processed cocoa powder , Dutch processed cocoa powder has less acid in it , less acidic , which makes fudgy baked goods good for brownies .

But for this cake , in theory , you want the acidity in the cocoa powder to react with the buttermilk .

In practice , we're amping things up because we added some vinegar more acid and we added baking soda , which will react with the vinegar .

Baking soda is what you add to baked goods that have some acid like brown sugar or buttermilk in them and they'll really like it fluffy and just amazing .

I'm adding three tablespoons of cocoa powder in .

You could add in a little bit more if you want extra chocolatey or even go as far as not adding any .

If you don't like chocolate for some reason , I'm not gonna judge you .

I have very good friends with chocolate allergies .

I'm mixing this in a bit before I add the third tablespoon in .

We're just sipping it in because cocoa notoriously has many lumps in it .

Right .

I don't know what happened .

It's like some messy person walked into my kitchen and just like wrecked havoc .

I don't know what to tell you .

It was an accident .

As my kids say it's ok when accidents happen , it's like that's true .

If they happen occasionally that never happened .

Now we're gonna mix that Coca powder in .

Get it really well mixed before we go on to the next step .

Ok .

Yes , there we go .

You always wanna mix well until you add the flour in .

Once the flour is in , you're really mixing until combined because you don't wanna activate the gluten in the flour and get a cake that is just kind of dense and gummy .

You want it to melt in your mouth , especially if it's red velvet .

I'm adding half of the dry mixture in right now .

Mix that until it is almost combined .

Add the wet mixture in half of it .

The remaining dry and the remaining wet red mixture looks like a science experiment .

I did so much recipe testing on this .

So when I originally made this and I tried everything I tried , I tried beetroot powder , the works and it just didn't , didn't cut the mustard , so to speak .

Oh boy .

I'm glad we prepped our pants first because this is foaming up already .

See all those bubbles happening .

That's the vinegar .

OK ?

This is foaming up .

So get that into your prepared pans , divide it up evenly and I'm using 36 inch .

You could use 28 inch pans .

Both work fine if you want 38 inch pans .

Double the recipe .

I tried eyeballing .

It did not work out .

So I popped them on to a scale , made sure they're all roughly equal .

And before these go into the oven , I'm putting on my ancient cake strips .

These guys are just wet fabric strips that you wrap around your cakes .

They give you a nice even bake with almost no doming but I forgot something .

Oh my gosh , I forgot .

I wanna take a little bit of batter .

So I'm gonna steal some batter from each pan .

I'm so glad I remembered it makes decorating the cake way easier .

So here I'm gonna add a little bit more food coloring and this is gonna be super red because I'm mixing it up with such a small amount of batter .

It'll bake up in like 15 minutes because it's not very much this batters for crumbling over the cake just to give it a nice red decoration at the end .

Cake strips are on and these guys are ready to go into the oven 3 50 for oh , close to 35 minutes .

You want to see that the edge is pulling away from the pan and the center is springy .

When you touch it , my cakes are out of the oven and as promised , I wanna show you how to get them out with no tearing .

First of all though , you should see here the cake separated from the pan .

That's how you know your cake is really done .

You can also listen to it shouldn't be popping off and making a bunch of sounds .

It should be fairly quiet right .

Here's the deal .

Wait for it to cool down just enough .

So it's touchable and then tap it .

You're giving it a lateral tap and it's breaking free of the bottom if it's at all stuck .

So tap tap , tap and I can even like see my cake jump in the pan , pop it out and it is nice and ready repeat the other cake layers and set them aside to cool completely before we assemble it out .

I'm having second thoughts .

Is this too chocolate ?

Let me know in the comments , I'm gonna ask Brian what he thinks ?

Does it need to be more red for everybody ?

It was only in the 19 forties that things got really out of control with food coloring before then they would look basically like this .

So I don't know , I might remake them .

That was like a hint of red velvet kick .

So I made it up again two tablespoons of cocoa powder .

You could even go down to one and a little bit more food coloring in the red .

OK ?

A little bit more food coloring in the buttermilk red , red .

That looks way better .

OK ?

If you watch this channel , you know , I'm normally not one to pour food coloring into things , but everything has a time and a place .

And this cake is a special occasion cake that people want to be , want to see it and be visually struck by its color and beauty .

That's the nice color we want to see and you can see how frosty it is from all of the vinegar .

We added that combined with the baking soda .

These look great while they're cooling .

We're gonna make the most amazing cream cheese frosting ever .

It's so easy to into the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment or a big bowl .

If you're using a hand mixer add one cup of butter that's 226 g and it should be room temperature and preferably unsalted .

Although you can use salted butter in this just don't add any more salt .

Now , we're adding 28 ounce blocks of cream cheese , 452 g .

And by the way , the cream cheese in this instance doesn't have to be really liquidy because cream cheese frosting is amazing and delicious .

but it can be a little soft , which is frustrating .

You don't want to add tons and tons of sugar to it to stabilize it because it is too sweet .

If you use cooler cream cheese , it just has a little bit of a thicker consistency and your frosting will set up really nice .

Lock it off .

We're gonna mix this up for a few minutes until it is nice , creamy and homogenous .

And once it's nice and mixed , we're gonna add a teaspoon of vanilla and a pinch of salt unless you use salt and butter .

And now it's time to add the powdered sugar , six cups or 680 g .

And that's gonna be added like in a couple of batches .

Don't all , don't dump it all in at the same time because that will be a sugar explosion .

This is enough frosting by the way to decorate a three layer six inch cake or a two layer eight inch cake really easily mix on low in a few batches when you make frostings .

You really do not want to beat on high .

That's gonna give you a lot of air bubbles , which in this instance is just not great for decorating .

So low and slow is the way to go with frosting .

I'll be so proud of myself if there's not like sugar everywhere .

Wish me luck .

Just be patient .

And this will totally get worked in and be a wonderful silky consistency .

At first it looks a little bit like granular and weird , but it will get fixed on its own .

See already it's almost there and I wish you could smell these cakes with the frosting .

It's pretty amazing .

Do yourself a favor and scrape the bowl down at least once .

Really important to scrape the bowl down because otherwise you'll have some amazing frosting , some frosting .

It is too sweet .

Some that's too buttery .

You want to be all good .

Everyone gets an amazing bite .

Couple of minutes of mixing on low and pure silk .

It is amazing .

The consistency you get is just wonderful .

This is ready to go onto my cake .

Now it is a little soft , that's fine .

We're gonna build it carefully and then chill it .

I'm ready to build .

I like to make my cakes directly on a cake plate , but this one isn't getting transported if you need to move it , get a cardboard round , a little bit of frosting on the bottom for glue and we're gonna center it and now build it up , maybe like half a cup of frosting in between each layer .

That'll be about enough .

This cake is like really happy with the cream cheese frosting on it .

So don't skip a lot of people get intimidated with layer cakes and they are so easy .

Let me know if you want a video like a new video on all my cake decorating tips .

But if this started getting wobbly or something was going awry , the only thing you need to do is put a skewer through the middle and then just chill it up .

So it'll firm and fix itself .

Heat is the enemy of cakes until they're fully built .

Nice and tall and proud .

I love a three layer cake .

I'm doing a really simple but beautiful decoration scheme on this cake , plop some frosting on top .

One of the key elements will be that reserved little cupcake of frosting , frosting , that reserved extra red cupcake .

So that'll get crumbled up and we're gonna add it on to the side .

But first , oh , look at that .

That's a lovely cake but it's ok .

Let's get a nice layer on top .

Now we're gonna go for some coverage all down the side and here if you have a turn table , you could definitely use that .

This is the official cake decoration .

Mhm Yes .

So I like to get really close to my cakes .

Um I didn't shrink .

I'm tended to crumb coat this and crumb coating just means that you're going to add a thin layer and chill it up before adding a final coat .

But I think we can get , get away with not doing that .

Well , this is going into the fridge for a minute just until I get my piping bags .

Normally , this is what I did to begin with .

I just find it easier , fill up a big piping bag with the frosting and you can pipe it onto the side , get some good coverage and then smooth it out , snip the tip off your piping bag .

And now this is so much easier watch this just going to pipe along the edge and I should have plenty of frosting left over for a little flourish on top .

Cream cheese frosting is so delicious but do not stress about getting perfectly smooth .

It's not that kind of frosting , use a small knife and just smooth the side out a little bit up and down .

We're definitely gonna have excess .

That's fine .

That's for the top .

So now we're just going to give it more of a smooth , do not stress out about it though because we're adding crumbs all over it .

There's more decorations .

It's not supposed to be like a mirror .

Smooth cake .

This can hang out in the fridge for a few minutes while we do something else .

I reserved a little batter and baked one cupcake which is more red , had more red food coloring in it .

Now , you can crumble it up or you can use a cheese grater and just grate it up to get little crumbs that we're gonna decorate the side with .

There we go .

Lots of nice red crumbs to decorate our cake with , I plopped on an 8 46 tip .

That's a large closed , but you can use anything you like .

And now I'm just gonna decorate this with kind of a little scallop pattern .

Just go back and forth and really try and get some heightened definition but not so much that it will fall over .

That would be bad .

So I'm pulling it off then going back over and then pulling it off .

Cute .

Grab a handful of crumbs and we're just going to make a nice crummy skirt just like that .

Lets people know what's inside the cake and gives it a little bit of extra contrast .

Whenever you do a skirt , get some coverage on the base and then add a little bit on top .

So it's kind of a gradient of the material .

Yeah , that looks nice .

Just a couple extra pieces on top .

Really make a huge difference .

Your cake can be enjoyed right away or chilled .

Make sure you keep it in the refrigerator .

If it's hanging out for a while , melt in your mouth , chocolate cake with that luscious cream cheese frosting .

This is a must make recipe .

I hope you enjoy .

And if you like this video , check out my cake playlist .