Pink Velvet Cake – Liv for Cake

Traditional Pink Velvet Cake! Tender pink cake layers with a touch of chocolate paired with a tangy cream cheese frosting and a pink velvet crumble.

Pink Velvet Cake is a kind of traditional recipes that get requested time and again. That wealthy pink coloration is beautiful and paired with a cream cheese frosting, you’ll be able to’t actually go fallacious.

I really like studying the historical past behind timeless recipes like this, to learn the way they originated, how they grew to become fashionable, and the way they’ve modified over time.

In fact, I really feel the necessity to share that with you, so sit again for an additional fast historical past lesson — or skip forward to How To Make Pink Velvet Cake.

What’s Pink Velvet Cake?

Initially, again within the 1800’s, the colour of the cake was on account of non-Dutched anthocyanin-rich cocoa, which reacted with the vinegar and buttermilk within the recipe to create a wealthy pink/maroon coloration.

Lately, even commonplace cocoa powder from the grocery retailer has gone by some stage of Dutch processing, which strips a few of the acid and prevents the colour change from taking place (at the very least to the extent that it used to).

To compensate, recipes nowadays use a LOT of pink coloring (often in liquid type) to get that brilliant or wealthy pink coloration.

The cake’s rise to recognition really took place in the course of the Nice Despair. An organization known as Adams Extract created the Pink Velvet Cake recipe we all know in the present day as a advertising and marketing tactic, in hopes of boosting gross sales in a tough time.

Their recipe makes use of shortening (which is cheaper than butter), Adams butter flavoring, Adams vanilla, and naturally, Adams pink meals coloring. Adams gave out the recipe totally free on recipe playing cards at grocery shops, and it shortly grew to become successful in households all throughout the nation.

Fellow Canadians will respect this: apparently the pink velvet cake was a staple at Eaton’s department shops within the 40’s and 50’s. Besides that they claimed the recipe to be their very own. Poor type, Eaton’s! 

In the event you’ve been following Liv for Cake for some time now, you understand that I desire to stay with pure flavors and colours as a lot as potential.

I’ve the occasional brilliant cake the place the flavors simply name for a pop of coloration, however I attempt to make the most of pure colorants like freeze-dried powder to present a few of the coloring. Making a Pink Velvet Cake was by no means excessive on my radar due to this. 

I’ve tweaked and improved that recipe in hopes of darkening the cake extra with cocoa powder than with coloring. I succeeded… considerably.

The fact is, if you would like a deep pink coloration you simply want so as to add synthetic coloring to it. I do know some folks have used beets to try to obtain the pink coloration, however that simply didn’t enchantment to me (regardless that I really like beets).

Methods to Make Pink Velvet Cake

Making this pink velvet cake is pretty easy — besides in my kitchen, the place issues are likely to go fallacious 90% of the time.

I used to be in a little bit of a rush (frequent nowadays) and my butter wasn’t fairly room temperature but. I made a decision to dice it and attempt to beat it anyhow, in hopes that the friction would heat it up. Properly, what it really did was completely break my KitchenAid paddle.

That is really the second time this has occurred, for this very same motive. Apparently I don’t be taught from my errors. It’s as a result of I’ve the reminiscence of a goldfish, and I simply didn’t keep in mind till it occurred once more.

The paddle I exploit mechanically scrapes the bowl for me (which is a HUGE time saver), however it’s plastic and clearly fragile. KitchenAid makes a metallic one with a scraper, however it’s not out there for my mannequin. Why this isn’t out there for all fashions is past me, and why on earth is it not commonplace?

Who desires to scrape the bowl? Ever??

I had no selection now. I tossed out the butter I had within the bowl in case there have been any plastic fragments in it, and resorted to utilizing my inventory paddle and scraping the bowl by hand. 

My plastic scraper paddle has made me so lazy. I did a horrible job of manually scraping the bowl, regardless that I did it like 4-5 instances all through the method (large ache within the butt). W

hen I used to be pouring the cake batter into the tins, there have been seen sections of unincorporated butter and sugar (lol). For sure, this confirmed in my baked layers, and one among them sagged a bit on one facet.

Do higher than I do, folks!

Anyhow, as I used to be saying, making this Pink Velvet Cake is fairly easy — cream your butter and sugar, add eggs one by one, and so forth. The important thing factor is that you simply need to add your cocoa powder and pink coloring earlier than you begin including your flour.

In the event you try to paint your batter on the very finish, as soon as all of the elements are added, you’ll more than likely overmix your batter, leading to a less-than-perfect dense (and typically fragile) cake. 

That is true for all truffles that use the creaming technique, so I at all times suggest coloring earlier than including the flour and milk.

You need to add the coloring in proper after your eggs and preserve including it till it’s a deep shade of pink. This took about 1/2 to 2/3rds of a 0.75oz bottle of Americolor Tremendous Pink coloration gel. I didn’t measure it, I simply saved including till I had what seemed like the fitting coloration. 

You should utilize liquid pink meals coloring in the event you desire — you’ll want anyplace from 1-2oz of this. However I like that the colour gels are extra concentrated and you utilize much less of them.

The Americolor ones are also higher at not leaving a wierd after-taste like some meals coloring does.

Pink Velvet Crumble

A fast word concerning the crumble on high. I made this as a result of I wished one thing to brighten the highest with, and I didn’t simply need to use cake crumbs. Plus I by no means have any since my cake layers bake up flat each time.

The crumble was a HUGE ache within the butt to make. I tried to make it from scratch, however after 5 whole fails, I gave up and opted for cake combine. After 5 extra makes an attempt I lastly had one thing near what I had envisioned.

I had deliberate to make use of this between the cake layers for some crunch, however I didn’t love the flavour of it, so I simply used it on the highest as an ornamental factor. It’s utterly elective!

What actually makes the pink velvet cake, I feel, is the mix of the cake with the cream cheese frosting. It’s actually a novel and scrumptious taste pairing. A chunk or two of this cake might have shortly disappeared shortly after I took the photographs.

In the event you’re a Pink Velvet fan, I hope you’ll love my tweaked model of this traditional cake recipe!

On the lookout for extra Traditional Cake Recipes?

This submit was initially printed on 02/14/19 and was up to date with new content material on 02/06/23.