Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

These are not, by any means, the traditional red velvet cakes.  Admittedly this is mostly because I simply did not have any buttermilk and didn't fancy going to the only supermarket near me that sells it (in my defence it was raining rather hard), so I improvised.

Due to my (again) not paying complete attention to what I was doing I ended up using a recipe that I hadn't previously intended to (I had left the other recipe book in my bedroom on the floor after a bit of late night reading), so here is my completely fake recipe for red velvet cake (it was neither as moist nor as spongy as the original that's for certain).  The funny thing was that I didn't realise that I had used the recipe until I actually started to spoon it into the cases (and then only because I had to re-scoop it into the cases because there simply wasn't enough.  If you want to repeat my mistakes then below is the recipe I used:

125g unsalted butter (softened)
125g caster sugar
150g self-raising flour
2 large eggs
2tbsp cocoa powder (here I used Cadbury's Bourneville, but you can use whatever you like)
25g dark chocolate (melted)
1/4 tsp of food colouring (I use the gel but you can use a full teaspoon of the liquid)

I started off with the basic batter mix, beating the butter and caster sugar together until it was a smooth pale cream colour, by hand this took me about 10 minutes (later on I started to use the hand mixer because my wrists started to ache (did you know that baking can give you RSI?).

Butter and sugar (yum - lovely on a dry Weetabix)

One egg...then another

If it curdles...

Add a little of the flour

With a bit of elbow grease you can make it look like this

Once you have blended all of this together it's time to add the flour, I always sieve mine to ensure that there are no little bits in it (though to be honest these days it's normally packaged having been sifted a few times so this is just me being ultra-cautious).

Here is where the recipe deviates slightly from the one you expect.  Instead of just adding the pitiful amount of dark chocolate that the recipe calls for I melted the chocolate in two tbsp of semi-skimmed milk, this ensured that the batter maintained a good dropping consistency.  Once I had added the last of the chocolate I folded in some gel food colouring and managed to get it a beautiful reddish brown.

Before it's measured into the cupcake cases

In the red cases

I used my brand new ice cream scoop to ensure that the size of each cupcake was the same (though as mentioned above this was not as easy as it should have been due to the batter not going as far as I thought it would).

In the oven

 The cakes cracked a little on top when they rose (I think that this is because the batter was a little thick - next time I will use a bit more milk and see if this helps).  They baked in the centre of the oven at 160⁰C for 20 minutes until the skewer came out clean and the sponge sprang back quickly when pressed.  When I took them out of the oven I left them in the tin for 10 minutes and then transferred them onto a cooling rack until they were completely cold.

Fresh out of the oven

I normally would wait only until they were cold and then top them with cream cheese frosting but I didn't want to store the sponges in the fridge in case they didn't survive the night intact.  I made the frosting by combining the following in bowl and beating for 8 minutes with a hand mixer until it was a beautiful pink and the consistency of proper trifle custard:

125g unsalted butter (softened)
450g icing sugar
300g full-fat cream cheese
1/4tsp food colouring

I then stored the frosting in a piping bag in the fridge overnight (I didn't want to put the finishing touches on them until they were at work.

The finished cakes

Apparently they sold within 5 minutes of the sale opening when one person bought the entire dozen...