Red velvet what is it made of

Using beet or pomegranate juice to dye the cake is one contemporary tweak; or using whipped goat cheese icing for a more savory version; or even using red wine in the batter. Today, most red velvet cakes are made with a lightly tangy, sweet cream cheese version.

Either way, this cake is mostly just a vehicle for that sweet, pristine white frosting. The Splendid Table covered red velvet cake this weekend. In short, velvet cakes are a Victorian invention.

ETA: chocolate cake made with red wine is divine. My favorite version is from the Smitten Kitchen. A google search will reveal it to you. A red velvet cake , to me, is more special than a regular chocolate cake. It may be due to its unique color, or to the traditional and scrumptious cream cheese frosting on top. Even though I have indulged on both, I still don't know the difference between the two.

Let's find out together. A chemical reaction helps create this cake's color. While some people think the Red Velvet comes from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in the s, it is actually a product from the Great Depression. It was a marketing ploy from Adams Extract, a food coloring company. Before this scheme, red velvet was made with cocoa powder, buttermilk and vinegar.

It's the chemical reaction between the cocoa powder which contains anthocyanin, a pH-sensitive antioxidant that reacts to acids and the vinegar and buttermilk. This reaction makes the cake its famous red-tinted color. Adams' purpose, however, was to sell more food coloring, so their recipe included a lot of red coloring.

This transformed the traditional deep maroon color into the bright red that we know today. Chocolate cake usually doesn't have red velvet's signature cream cheese frosting. Jonathan Boulton. Honestly, after writing this, I have no idea why chocolate cake has been confused with red velvet for so long. Additionally, the red cake usually includes acidic ingredients— either buttermilk or vinegar —something you don't find in a standard chocolate cake. And most obviously, red velvet cake isn't brown like a rich chocolate cake is.

Typically, a red velvet cake is topped with a cream cheese-based frosting rather than a chocolate frosting, says Knorr, so that's the most obvious difference between the desserts besides the color. If you're looking to replicate the original red velvet cake sans red food dye, you'll need to take a special trip to the grocery store. Whereas the original recipe pre-Adams Extract used raw cocoa powder, most cocoa powders sold now are "alkalized" or "dutched.

Without those reddish-hued antioxidants, you won't get the same muted red color of the original recipe. You'll want to look for a raw, cacao powder which is different from "cocoa" powder in that it's not roasted , like Navitas Organics. Another way to ditch the dye? Consider using another unexpected ingredient: beets.

And that's all that really matters, right? As weight loss strategies go, this one's pretty delicious: miniature desserts that let you have your cake and lose it, too. The story behind how the iconic cake got its famous hue is actually rather complex.