Happy Valentine's Day, all! I'm not a big Valentine person-- I used to teach in the public schools. Valentine's day is teenaged license for PDA, crying in the bathroom when one should be in class, questionable behavior in every nook and cranny the building has to offer, etc. But, in the spirit of fun and chocolate, I decided to make some treats for my office.
Red velvet and I have been in a blood feud for quite some time now. I love really good red velvet, but absolutely cannot rationalize the gross amounts of food dye used to achieve the red color. A little history lesson before we begin....red velvet, done correctly, is a chocolate cake with a red hue, not a white cake with a whole bottle of dye dumped in it as is common today. The red hue was the result of a reaction between the cocoa powder, buttermilk and vinegar. The red hue was easier to achieve using this method before the days of Dutch process cocoa, which is why you probably don't see it even if you are using your great-great-grandma's recipe. Over the past century, many methods for making red velvet have unfolded-- ranging from using beets (which, actually, started during WWII due to food rationing and not, necessarily, just to get a red cake), to making a white cake and dumping huge amounts of dye into the batter. (We've all had that cake, right? The BRIGHT RED cake that you can psychosomaticly feel turning your digestive tract into cancer with all its Red #40? No? Just me???)
Put simply, I hate food dye. Not to say I never use it, but I try to avoid doing so. I've been working for a while now to come up with a solid red velvet recipe that uses little to no dye, and I've gotten to this recipe here, where a deep maroon can be achieved with only one teaspoon of food color. One teaspoon in the whole batch-- I can live with that.
