Red Velvet Cheesecake Cookie Cups | The Best Red Velvet Cake Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What makes a true red velvet cake? ›

Today, red velvet cake is made by combining cocoa powder, butter, sugar, eggs, and flour as well as buttermilk, vinegar, and red food coloring that gives the cake its iconic red tint. In a classic red velvet cake, cream cheese frosting is paired but the cake can be really be frosted with anything.

Cream Cheese Frosting – A silky, tangy cream cheese frosting is the perfect compliment to these cookies. They taste exactly like classic red velvet cake in cookie form!

White Vinegar: It sounds like a strange ingredient in a cake, but it is essential in a red velvet cake. This recipe calls for baking soda to leaven the cake (make the cake rise). The small amount of added vinegar allows the soda to do its best work.

What flavor is red velvet? While there are cocoa undertones, red velvet is not chocolate cake because it balances both chocolate and vanilla flavors. It contains cocoa but not the same quantity as traditional chocolate cake, resulting in a more subtle cocoa flavor and tanginess due to the buttermilk and vinegar.

The trick to using our Red Velvet Color when baking cakes and cupcakes is to lower the pH. Some ways to do this is by substituting baking powder in place of baking soda, using a natural non-alkalized cocoa powder, adding more white vinegar or buttermilk to your red velvet recipe, to achieve a bright red color.

Unfortunately some red food colours have a bitter taste because of the ingredients used, particularly the colourant red #3 (E127). So it may help to check the ingredients of the red food colour or use a red food colour paste that is sold as "no taste".

Red Velvet often comes paired with a Cream Cheese Frosting. However, there are so many other pairings that work perfectly with Red Velvet, such as: Classic Vanilla, Bourbon Vanilla, Chai, White Chocolate, and Cookies + Cream.

Tinting the Dough

Tinting the cookie dough red is optional. If you skip the food coloring, the cookies will be light brown. For the pictured cookies, I use 3/4 teaspoon gel food coloring. You can control how vibrant the red color is, so use more or less depending on the color you'd like.

Red velvet cake isn't always distinguished as a chocolate cake, but cocoa powder is reportedly the cause of its namesake hue. Food historians suggest that the natural cocoa of the Victorian era, partnered with buttermilk, resulted in the cake's burnished red hue and led to it being dubbed “red velvet cake.”

If you don't want to use vinegar, you can substitute an equal amount of lemon juice. If you want to skip the acidic liquid altogether, you can substitute a tablespoon of baking powder for each teaspoon of baking soda. Then add water equal to the amount of vinegar you omitted.

Why does my red velvet cake turn out brown? ›

The red food colouring makes the cake batter prone to splitting, and turns everything it touches red; a couple of grams over on the cocoa powder and the cake goes brown instead of a rich red; the cream cheese frosting has a tendency to turn to gloop at the very last minute for no apparent reason; and the list goes on.

Devil's food cake typically has coffee, sour cream, or water in the batter. While red velvet cake has tangier flavored liquids like buttermilk or vinegar. The different liquids also mean that Devil's food cakes have more moisture, which results in a more tender cake than red velvet.

The cocoa powder is used in less quantity and the taste develops by the mixing of vinegar and buttermilk with the cocoa powder. The recipe involves many ingredients in small quantity. The frosting- if used cream cheese is an expensive element in itself. It tastes wow if made at home without using any premix.

The flavor of blue velvet cake is the same as a red velvet cake—fluffy vanilla cake with a hint of chocolate slathered in tangy cream cheese frosting. It is easy to make a blue velvet cake from scratch with a blend of cocoa powder, vinegar, buttermilk, and bright blue food coloring.

While red velvet cake is technically a cocoa cake, there is a key difference between standard chocolate cake and red velvet cake. Chocolate cake recipes traditionally use Dutch-processed cocoa, while red velvet cake uses unprocessed cocoa, a more acidic ingredient that produces a deeper, more intense chocolate flavor.

The difference between Red Velvet Cake and other cakes are its ingredients and colors. No other layer cake uses buttermilk and vinegar in the recipe. When mixed with cocoa powder, the buttermilk and vinegar cause the chemical reaction that turns the cake red. The vinegar also helps preserve the cake's iconic color.

While Chocolate Cake is made primarily with cocoa powder and sometimes melted chocolate, Red Velvet Cake is made with a small amount of cocoa powder, but is also known for its signature bright red color, which is usually achieved by adding red food coloring to the batter.

Many years ago, the red color came from the presence of vinegar and buttermilk reacting with the anthocyanins in traditional cocoa powder. But for most of the last few decades, the red color has been supplied by Red #40 dye, in part because cocoa powder used now is alkalized to neutralize its acidity.

In the dessert world, this was initially called a “mahogany cake.” It delivered a light chocolate flavor and appeared red-brown due to the chemical reaction between baking soda, buttermilk, vinegar, and raw cocoa powder.