Tags
bake, cake, cook, food, Hummingbird Bakery, Recipe, Red velvet cake
I’ve been trying to perfect red velvet cupcake and cakes for a while now. After numerous not quite satisfactory results, and one horrible disaster, I decided to follow the Hummingbird Bakery recipe with some tweaks. It turned out poifect. Here’s what you’ll need! This recipe make either one large 2-layer cake to serve 6, or 12-16 cupcakes.
- 120g unsalted butter, very soft
- 330g caster sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 50g cocoa powder
- red food colouring, preferably christmas red by Sugarflair – NOT Dr Oetker (see below!)
- 1 tsp vanilla essence or extract
- 300g plain flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 240ml buttermillk
- 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 100g unsalted butter
- 600g icing sugar
- 250g full fat cream cheese
IMPORTANT PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT – The horrible disaster I had when trying to make these cupcakes was caused by using Dr Oetker red food colouring, which the Hummingbird recipe from my edition of the Cake Days cookbook (2011, so the one most people will have) calls for. For the love of god, do not buy any Dr Oetker ‘natural’ colours – they taste like absolute shit. Since Dr Oetker changed their recipe, I assume to make the product less full of artificial colours and more ‘natural’, Hummingbird have stopped recommending its use in this recipe. The batch of cupcakes I made using it sadly went into the bin, the Dr Oetker colouring gives them a disgusting, awful taste. Hummingbird now recommend that you use a gel/paste food colouring – I used christmas red by Sugarflair in this cake and it worked perfectly. Annoucement ends…
Anywhoo… lets get baking!! First, preheat your oven to 180 degrees/375 farenheit/gas mark 5 and prepare your baking tin.I sprayed my new Prestige round spring-form cake tin with Cake release spray (by Dr Oetker…. they’re not totally useless I guess). The tin was from TK Maxx who are AMAZING for great value bakeware.
Whisk up your very soft butter with the sugar until they are very fluffy indeed. Add eggs one at a time, whisking and scraping, whisking and scraping. Sieve in your cocoa powder (important as it tends to be lumpy) and add vanilla.
In another large bowl, sift the flour with the salt and then add half of the flour to your chocolate cake base, then half the buttermilk, then the other half of flour, then the rest of the buttermilk! Whisk whisk whisk it up. At this stage, I added my Sugarflair red food colouring (about half a tub to get it this red!). Lastly, in a small mug or glass, combine the vinegar and bicarb (fizzy!) and then add to cake mix and stir.
Spoon the batter into your greased tin and bake in the middle of the oven for around 40-55 minutes – depending on whether your oven is fan assisted, mine isn’t. Your cake is ready as soon as a toothpick or knife inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Once thoroughly cooled, cut your cake in half using a serrated knife. My cake had sunk in the middle, so I turned the top half over so that the sunk part was on the inside and the flat part was the cakes top. I also cut a little extra wedge of cake off to use to decorate the cale, as you can see from the uneven surface below!
Now we’re ready to make the frosting! I kept having issues with lumpy cream cheese frosting, despite exactly following the recipe’s instructions, until I found this post. Unfortunately, lots of recipes just don’t tell you how to ensure to end up with smooth frosting! The key is to make sure your butter is very very very soft when you add the icing sugar to it, and fully creamed together. This is tough because of the ratio of butter to icing sugar (1:6) so I add a splash of milk until the mix comes together. DO NOT add the cream cheese until your buttercream base is fully mixed, or lumps will result.
Then, add your cream cheese and a squeeze of lemon juice and whisk. Try to resist sticking your face in the bowl. For some reason I didn’t take any pictures of the frosting stage, as I was in a massive rush and just covered the cake in frosting rather than piping rose swirls as I’d planned. You could also use sprinkles (or nothing at all) to decorate the top of the cake, but I love how the red crumbs look on the white background.
Melinda said:
If I buy the colouring gel instead of liquid. how much of it should I use in my recipe?
kerrycooks said:
Hello! I normally use a clean knife to add a little at a time to a mixer and keep going till I’m happy with the colour – probably about a full tsp overall
Steph- Mean Miss Mustard said:
Ooooh they look lovely! I totally agree with using gel colourings over liquid ones. You get a much deeper colour as well as no weird taste. Weirdly my local Asda only stocks green and blue gels. I don’t think a green/ blue velvet cake would quite work haha.
Randeep Heer (@RandeepHeer) said:
How many mls of liquid food colouring would you use eg silver spoon
kerrycooks said:
Hi there – i wouldn’t recommend liquid food colouring as its not possible to get the same colour and they tend to add an unpleasant flavour
Sopho said:
Hi Kerry,
Thanks so much for this recipe, It was a BIG hit in my house last weekend.
Did I do something wrong with the icing? It was very runny and didn’t look as though it would look anything like roses if I’d tried to pipe them… I did manage to avoid horrible lumps, but when I sandwiched the two cakes together, it just sort of flowed down the sides of the bottom layer. Should I have done something differently? I put it in the fridge for half an hour or so before I iced the cake, is it just a case of leaving it there longer?
Pingback: My first red velvet cupcakes « emiliahearts
Tom Noshh said:
I agree> the dr oetker red food new bottle (natural) is a disaster and i also ended binning quiet a few and almost thought that it was my fault. The previous food colouring was spot on and i bake a lot for my cafe Crave KItchen and other cafes but i have not attempted to make this lovely red velvet cakes again. So, thanks for the recommendation and will give it a try. I wrote to them and i hope they would bring it back and give people an option to choose plus they taste awful. Many thanks.
Helen said:
What size tins did you use please? And do you still bake for 40-55 minutes when using two separate tins, or is this just when you do all the batter in one tin?
Sorry for all the questions, I don’t want to do it wrong!! =)
kerrycooks said:
Hey Helen! No problem, I baked it in an 9 inch tin, and if you’re using two tins, adjust the cooking time to around 25 minutes, and as always, test for doneness as soon as you suspect they might be ready
Good luck!
Helen said:
Hi Kerry
Thanks for your speedy response! I’ll give it a go and let you know how I get on =)
Lisa said:
just bought ingredients about to start baking!! Wish me luck! By the way can I separate into 2 tins instead of cutting in half??
kerrycooks said:
Good luck! Yep definitely, I always use two tins, much easier than cutting in half.
Lisa said:
i’m baking it tonight to take to a bake sale tomorrow morning, shall i ice it toight or leave it to the morning??
kerrycooks said:
🙂 I would do at least a crumb coat of the frosting tonight once the cake is cool, as it takes a while to set. Then stick it in the fridge overnight 🙂
Lisa said:
thank you, it has come out oven now and looks super fab!!!
kerrycooks said:
yay! well done!
ninasnosh said:
I made this for my mother in-laws birthday was fabulous.
Thanks
kerrycooks said:
Thanks Nina! I’m v happy it was a success!
torince said:
This looks delicious! I kept reading people’s complaints about the Dr Oetker stuff (of which I have two bottles, I thought it was just me), I’ll need to hunt something else down.
kerrycooks said:
Thank you! 🙂 Haha, no I thought it was just me at first… but after a while I realised. I recommend using sugarflair gel food colouring from cake decorating shops or ebay 🙂
Lee said:
How many grams of cocoa did you use? 🙂 looks fab btw
kerrycooks said:
Oops typo, sorry Lee I’ll add it in now!
Lee said:
Thanks!! Cant wait to try this, I used dr oetker in a batch last week before reading this, omg they were bad, I could smell the nastiness before they’d even finished baking!!!
kerrycooks said:
Same here 😦 and I was even blaming myself before I figured out it was the dr oetker stuff!
Liz Berwick said:
Great version! I find silver spoon red colouring works well too.
kerrycooks said:
Thanks Liz, and thanks for the tip!
Susannah Bianchi said:
This looks so amazing. I love the sequence ending with the empty plate. Always appreciate all the effort you put into your posts.
kerrycooks said:
thank you my dear!! I couldn’t resist going back for One. More. Bite.
Oldcat said:
Why would you want ‘natural’ artificial coloring?
kerrycooks said:
An excellent question, thank you! My view is that if you want your cake red you know its not natural!
Emmyw @ (Kitchen Goddess in training!) said:
Ooooooh that looks so so good! Thanks for the reminder about evil Dr Oetker food colouring!!!!!! I’ve had a few issues using it to colour icing as well 😦 it’s no good a cake looking good if it doesn’t taste it! This looks fab though! Well done 🙂
kerrycooks said:
Thanks Emma! I don’t know why they would even sell a product thats so singularly useless AND foul tasting. In fact I asked them that by email (I was that incensed!) but they just ignored me!