The BEST Red Velvet Cake Recipe

You won’t believe how easy it is to make this classic Red Velvet Cake recipe from scratch! This cake is so incredibly soft, tender, moist and pairs wonderfully with my tangy and sweet cream cheese frosting. With its wonderful velvety texture and fluffy frosting, you won’t be able to get enough of this irresistible cake.

RECIPE: https://preppykitchen.com/best-red-velvet-cake/

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Hey, I’m John Canel and today on Preppy Kitchen, we’re making a luscious melt in-you mouth red velvet cake. So, let’s get started. First off, set your oven to 350 so it’s nice and hot and we’re going to combine the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Starting with 2 and 1/2 cups or 300 g of allpurpose flour. Using a scale because that’ll give me the most melt in-you mouth cake. If you’re using measuring cups, do not scoop. You’ll want to fluff the flour up. Sprinkle it into your measuring cup. Your goal is to not compact it. So, you don’t want to push it down. And then level it off. That’ll give you approximately the correct amount. If you just scooped it up, I guarantee your cake will be dense and bready. Perfect. To buff things up, I’m using a teaspoon of baking soda. Baking soda needs an acid to react to it, and we will be adding some acids for a really like fluffy, delicious cake. And for contrast, a teaspoon of salt. If you’re using super finer table salt, I would decrease that down to about 3/4 of a teaspoon or even half. Let’s grab a whisk. Scale’s done for a bit. Whisk, whisk, whisk this all together so everything’s nicely distributed. If you have any lumps in your flour, you could totally sift this out, too. Nicely whisked. Set that aside and grab a stand mixer or a large bowl in your hand mixer. To the bowl of your mixer, we’re adding half a cup or 113 g of softened butter. It shouldn’t be too firm. And to make sure it’s not, we’re going to give it a quick cream. Pop your paddle attachment on and just mix this up for a few seconds on medium. Maybe like 30 seconds. We just want to make sure there’s no hidden clumps of hard butter hanging out in the middle of your stick. Chances are your cake’s going to live in the fridge. If you want to make it ahead of time, but you want it to be super soft and melt in your mouth. You can substitute the delicious butter for some veggie oil. You’ll use the same amount and do all the same steps, but when your cake comes out of the fridge, it’ll be super soft. If you plan on making and serving your cake immediately, you don’t need to make the substitution. Once your butter is nicely creamed, we can add one and a half cups or 300 gram of granulated sugar. I love red velvet cake in part because I love cream cheese frosting. It’s like my favorite flavor. I have a lot of favorites. This is true. Cream cheese is right up there, though. It is so delicious and the flavor of this cake is a bit controversial. Once your sugar is added, we’re going to go to medium for about 3 minutes until this is light and fluffy. And you can definitely scrape the bowl down. Red velvet cake started off as velvet cake in the Victorian times. This has changed and now it’s red velvet cake heavy on the food coloring. It used to get a really delicate light pink color from a tiny bit of cocoa powder. So, we have a cake that’s flavored with vanilla and chocolate for the lightest of chocolate flavors paired with a luscious cream cheese frosting. In the 1950s, food coloring became more readily available and people started adding a ton of red food coloring this to amp up that light pink color all the way to like crimson. So, you don’t have to add food coloring. It could be a red velvet cake that’s not red. Today, we’re going to use food coloring and make this more of the traditional red velvet cake that we all know and love. I am going to scrape the wool down here. And by the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There’s two new delicious recipes every week. Back to mixing. While our butter is mixing up, we can prep the pans. For this recipe, you could use three 6-in layers for a cute tall cake or two eight or nine inch layers. The baking time will be adjusted, and I’ll tell you about that later, but any of those cake sizes will work well. You can use butter and flour, or you can use baking spray. Both will work. To make sure these don’t stick, I’m adding a little round of parchment paper right in the center. You can use a heaping tablespoon of flour and just divide that among the pans. Once your butter is nice and creamed up, we’re going to add two room temperature eggs in. Large, please. I shouldn’t be doing that. You should be cracking this into a small bowl, checking for shells, and then adding that in. Mix on medium. And we want the first egg to incorporate before adding the next in. No sh definitely scrape the bowl down. 2 tsp of vanilla for some lovely flavor. We’re going to mix this all together. I’m kicking this up to high just for a few seconds. And now I have a lovely fluffy delicious mixture. It is however missing a few things. Some acid and some cocoa powder. So we’re going to add both of those in. For the cocoa powder, you have a choice. I’ll say both will work, but for best results, use a natural cocoa powder. Dutch processed cocoa powder is dark. That’s also called special dark cocoa powder. The natural cocoa powder is lighter and this is going to be more acidic. So, the acid will react with our baking soda and the buttermilk and you’ll get that kind of signature light pink color as well as a beautiful like a beautiful texture for the cake. Whenever you add a weak acid into a batter, it’s going to prevent the gluten from like connecting and forming and you’re going to get a melt in your mouth cake. two tablespoons of cocoa powder and two I’m going to sift this in because cocoa powder is notorious for having lumps. Lots of lumps in there. Look at that. You just use your finger or a spoon to push them through. Okay, we’re going to mix the cocoa powder in. Oh, adding more cocoa powder gives you more chocolate flavor, but it also makes the batter much darker. And if you’re super concerned about having a like perfect red color, you can go down to one tablespoon and just add more food coloring in. I don’t care about the color as much as the flavor. Okay, one more scrape down cuz you can see it’s a light chocolate color on the inside and no chocolate all on the outside of the bowl. Today I’m pairing red velvet with a cream cheese frosting. I’ve told you it’s one of my favorite flavors and it’s also what is now traditional. However, originally we did not use cream cheese frosting. We would have used man frosting and I have a recipe for man frosting on the channel. You can click up here for the video. It is super easy to make, really easy to handle, and has a lovely like texture and flavor. It’s much different from a regular frosting because you’re using flour and less butter. So, if you want to be a purist, you could definitely make a batch of man frosting for this cake recipe. We’re almost ready to combine the dry and the wet ingredients, but we have some buttermilk to add. The buttermilk, also lightly acidic, will give us a better texture in our cake, but we’re going to add a little bit more acid in the form of 1 tbsp of white vinegar. Add that into your buttermilk. And here you’re also going to add the food coloring. I could mix the wet ingredients for a long time. I could whisk the dry ingredients for a long time. But once I combine the two, you just mix them until they’re just combined. If you overm mix them, your cake’s going to be gummy, not melt in your mouth, dense, not fluffy, and it’ll even taste different. You don’t want to do that. My point is that you don’t want to like start adding food coloring in at the very end and keep adding it while mixing it in because you’ll overm mix your cake. I’m going to mix it in to my buttermilk instead. The amount of food coloring depends on the type of food coloring. This is gel food coloring, which is super concentrated. I’m going to add in like one and a half drops. There we go. Let’s whisk this in and see what it’s like. Gel food coloring is super concentrated, but it’s also very thick and you have to really mix it in. For the sake of YouTube, I want this to be a really like rich red color. So, I’m adding a lot of food coloring in. But, it’s totally up to you if you want to add none or a ton or just a drop. I’m not going to lie and say one drop of regular food coloring isn’t going to give you a red color, though. It’s not going to happen. Shockingly though, for the decorations, I’m going to use a little bit of crumbs. And I’m going to make a tiny like half cupcake with some batter that I reserve that has even more food coloring in it. So, this is good for the cake, for the decorations. If you’re using crumbs, you want more. It’s time to combine. We’re going to add half of our flour in while mixing on the lowest setting, half of my buttermilk vinegar mixture, the remaining flour, and the remaining buttermilk mixture. I’m not going to finish mixing this. I’m going to do it all by hand. Well, I’m going to finish it off by hand while also getting all this buttermilk out because we have a lot of acid in here with our baking soda. This is going to start frothing up really quickly. And from experience, I think it’s best to get this like into the cake pans as quickly as possible. It’s not a batter you can like leave in the fridge and hang out for a few hours and get the best results. Use your spatula and just scrape this down and fold it together. Looking for an even distribution of color and no remaining flour. All that food coloring. And I have essentially like a light red color. This will change a bit as we bake it though. Nicely folded, no streaks. We’re going to pop this into our pans, distributing the batter evenly. Into your three six-in cake pans, your two eight or 9in cake pans, whatever you’re choosing. Can eyeball this to start and then use a scale just to double check that everything is the same and nice and even. It’s okay if they’re slightly different, but that’ll affect the bake times. Going to reserve like a couple tablespoons of this batter for my little cupcake. Little extra food coloring for that. This step is totally optional. It’s just if you want to have some crumbs for the outside of your cake, which is one of the more traditional ways of decorating them. You have like beautiful white frosting with a little crumble of red crumbs. Grab an offset spatula and give your cake layers a quick smooth. They’ll self-level in the oven, but you want to give them a nice head start, especially because we’re stacking them. As you can see, I have some cake strips on the edge of my cakes. These are just damp fabric strips that you wrap around the edge, and they give you a flat cake layer with a more tender edge because they’re cooling the side down so it all bakes together. If you don’t use cake strips, chances are that the center will keep baking cuz it takes the longest while the outside’s done. And that’s why you get a domed cake with a kind of crispy edge. This is nice and red. So, we’re going to pop this into the oven with our cake layers. This little mini cupcake probably only needs about 10 minutes or so. I’ll start checking it at 10, then pull it out when the center is set. If you’re making a batch of red velvet cupcakes with this recipe, which you can totally do, they need 15 minutes. Our 6-in cake layers need 30 to 35 before you check the center for dness. And if you’re making a bigger eight or 9 in cake, I would take 5 minutes away from the bake time, so 25 to 30, and start checking them because the thinner layers bake quicker. We’re going to pop these into the oven, and while they bake, we’ll make a dreamy cream cheese frosting. In you go. While your cake layers are cooling, we can whip up the most delicious and luscious cream cheese frosting. Into the bowl of my stand mixer, I’m adding 1 and 1/2 cups or 340 gram of softened butter. So nice and soft. It’s going to mix really well. That’s three sticks. Like I said at the beginning of the video, you could try being very traditional and making an frosting for this. The last time I made a red velvet video, I had a lot of man frosting requests. So, I’m trying to mention it now so everyone knows that it’s totally a delicious alternative. I also want 16 oz or two blocks of softened cream cheese. One. and two. Pop your paddle attachment on and we’re going to cream this up. Medium speed until it’s nice and smooth, really well combined and fluffy. It’s about 3 minutes. While this is mixing, you might as well go ahead and measure and sift 5 1/2 cups or 1 and 1/2 lb of powdered sugar. Sifting powdered sugar is a good idea because any lumps will clog your piping tip. If you’re doing a more rustic swoopy cake, you don’t have to worry about it. It’ll all work out. Cleaning up as I go along. Once this is nice and creamy, we can add a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla. Decrease your speed to low and just add your powdered sugar in gradually. You can scrape down a couple times. We just want this to be really homogeneous. So, it’s all equally sweet. Cream cheese frosting is so delicious. It’s one of my favorite flavors, but there is a trade-off. On the plus side, easy to make, super creamy, dreamy, luscious texture, and the taste is amazing. On the minus column, it’s very soft. You can keep adding powdered sugar, and eventually it’ll firm up, but then it’s too sweet. So, anything you make with cream cheese frosting is either going to be like a sheetcake, cupcakes, or if you’re doing a layer cake, just factor in some chill time. And if you made a two-layer cake, it’ll be a bit more stable than this three layer cake. All right, it’s time for a scrape down. This is looking really good already, though. Once all the sugar is mixed in and you’ve scraped the bowl down, increase the speed to medium and mix it for a minute until it’s like a little bit fluffier and nice and smooth. This looks amazing. I have one more bit of prep to do before we assemble the cake. Don’t think I forgot about my little super red cupcake. Remove the paper. Grab a cheese grater and we’re just going to create crumbs that we can use to decorate the cake. So vibrant. Grate this up. I’m going to use the crumbs to create a beautiful skirt that’ll just let everybody know, hey, this is a delicious red velvet cake and you want a piece. Nicely crumbled. You can see it’s a really beautiful vibrant color. The main reason I used a cheese crater instead of my hands was that I have fluffy, beautiful crumbs here, and if you use your fingers, they can kind of get mushed together. Don’t love that. I love a 6-in cake because you don’t have to make a massive amount of batter. Realistically, the piece sizes that you get, you could feed eight people from this and have like a nice portion of cake that is satisfying, but doesn’t make you feel sick. And they are so like tall and cute. It’s a really good proportion. If you want to get that same proportion with an 8 in cake, you are making massive amounts of batter, massive amounts of frosting. And for my family of four, this is perfect. My cake’s going to have a decorative topping. So, about a cup of frosting will be reserved. And I’m using a medium closed star tip. Set that aside. Onto my first layer, I’m adding about half a cup of frosting. Smooth that out. Next layer goes on. Center it up. If you’re making this on a hot day and things are kind of like going sideways, just pop this into the fridge to chill out and the the buttercream will firm up. I actually much prefer a soft buttercream because it’s so much more pleasant to eat, but it is can be more wobbly. Final layer on top. Nice and not tilted. Spread the remaining frosting on top and on side of my cake. And then just smooth things out. If you’re feeling very unsure about cake decorating, one, I have a cake decorating video you could watch, but two, you can crumb coat this cake, which is just covering the whole cake in like half a cup of frosting that you smooth into a paper thin layer. Then chill the cake and finish covering it. You won’t have any crumbs and everything will be really stable. You could also pipe the frosting onto the side and then just smooth it out. Once you have some nice coverage, your cake might look like a disaster. That’s fine. You’ll fix it. Grab a bench scraper and just smooth it out. You can smooth it out and add more frosting to the places that need more. Also, so important when you’re working with cream cheese frosting, you got to let go of those Virgo tendencies. It’s not going to be perfect. Just get it looking nice. It’s not like you’re using Swiss mering buttercream and this is a cake that’s for a wedding. This is not ever going to be that. If you try to do it, you’re going to be sad. I’m just jiggling it as I see it leaning. If it’s really bad, just pop a skewer right into the center and pop it into the fridge to chill for a bit. The skewer can come out at the very end. Taking my own advice, it’s not going to be perfect. It’s just going to look nice. Your last step is just to finish cleaning the edge by bringing it in. I’m using a turntable today. It is so much nicer decorating with it because it’s just really easy to turn. If you don’t have one, you can actually try using your microwave turntable. Your microwave has a glass plate on rollers. Take both of those out and they work as a turntable. I have a good amount of frosting left over, so I’m going to finish this off with a rope. You could use dollops if you’re running out of frosting, which you use the least. You could do like a shell pattern by going up and down or you can do a rope which is making small circles as you turn. So just keep turning right on the edge and it kind of fixes a lot of the problems that your cake might have. I did it. Yay. It looks nice. The last thing to do before we pop this into the fridge is grab some of our crumbs and very gently just place them onto the bottom part of our cake. This is called a skirt. And you just need to do this before the frosting dries out and isn’t sticky anymore. Last little bit going on. If you want to get a bit of a gradient, you kind of just gently toss some towards the top and a few will stick. And I’ll finish cleaning this up once everything’s set. Once chilled, give your cake a slice. And just like that, it’s ready to enjoy. The cake has a perfect melt in your mouth texture. And the star is the cream cheese frosting, but the last thing you taste is that light chocolate flavor from the cake. It’s delicious. I hope you get a chance to make the recipe.