The Only Red Velvet Cake Recipe You’ll Ever Need

See, mine was manhandled but you. No, it's not. Hi Bold Bakers. An American classic from the south has fast become one of the most iconic cakes around the world. I'm talking about, of course, a lovely red velvet cake. It’s a cake that's flavored with a little bit of cocoa, colored red and is served with a lovely traditional Ermine frosting. I'm going to share this recipe with you today, so we'll start by sifting together our dry ingredients. I have some flour, sugar, cocoa powder, some cinnamon, baking soda and a little bit of salt and then just sieve that to remove any lumps. So I get asked, why do I sieve some ingredients and not others? I always sieve cocoa powder and powdered sugar because they have a little bit of moisture in them, and they can tend to be a little bit lumpy, so I always sieve those two ingredients. OK, lovely, that’s our dry ingredients. Set that over to the side, and then we're going to mix together our wet ingredients. So in a separate jug I'm going to add in my flavorless oil. Now oil in red velvet cake makes it really nice and lovely. Use a flavorless oil like sunflower, canola vegetable oil or something like that. If you want you can also use a coconut oil and those flavors will actually work well in this cake. So next we’re going to add in some buttermilk and that’s a really important ingredient 'cause it tenderizes the cake because of the acid. If you don’t have buttermilk, I do have a video of how you can make your own really easily. Next, we're gonna add in our eggs little splash of vanilla extract. Next we add in our food coloring. Now I use a gel food coloring because it's really concentrated and you get really Deep Reds, but you want to really use just as little red food coloring as you can, but just keep on adding it until you get the color that you want. Give it a little mixy mix. And then we're going to add our wet into our dry. This is one of the reasons I love this cake. You can mix it all by hand. You don’t neeed a stand mixer or anything like that. So I've been a chef for a long time, but just recently I discovered that mixing batters like red velvet cake, pancake batter, thing is it’s quite delicate and you don't over mix and mix it with a fork and actually works really well. We can get to the bottom of the bowl and we don't end up over mixing it, so there's a little trick for ya. Wow, so check this out. Can you see that the mix is actually bubbling. What that is is a chemical reaction between the baking soda and the buttermilk. So what we want to do right now is get this straight into a hot oven. So here I have two 9 inch cake pans, buttered and lined. You could also make this cake in three 6 inch tins and you’ll get a lovely kind of smaller cake, but a higher cake. So what you want to do is just eyeball this between the two pans. Just eyeball it as best as you can. There we go. This is a really thin batter, so just to kind of even a little bit, give it a little bit of a shimmy shimmy shake. And get them into a nice hot oven. These cakes look gorgeous. And you’ll notice they bake really fast, only about 30 minutes or so and you do have to be careful not to over bake these guys, so just bake them until it's farm underneath your finger and it has pulled a little bit away from the side there, but this is perfect. So the cakes have cooled down, it's time to decorate them. Now let's talk about frosting. Here I have a big bowl of Ermine frosting. This is a frosting that was traditionally used on red velvet cake. It is a typical frosting, but it has a flour in it so it's a little bit different. It is really nice, it pairs really well with the red velvet cake. I've got a recipe on my website. You can also use cream cheese frosting which works amazingly. So either of these will work really well if you're trying to be really authentic, this is your guy. So to decorate this cake I like keep it really easy. Place one layer of cake on your cake stand or your plate. Put a big dollop of frosting in the middle. Put on your second layer, more frosting on top. And then move this frosting around to create your crumb coat. Now for those of you who don't know, a crumb coat is that first initial layer that will gather any crumbs or any loose bits of your cake. So there's the crumb layer, we want to get this into the fridge and chill it for around 45 minutes to an hour, let it set, and then we're going to finish decoration on top of it with my spatula. I just do big swirls and make sure that the whole cake is covered and all you have is this lovely finished product. So the great thing about a cake is that you don't have to wait for it, you can just dig right in. Look at this. This is a behemoth of a cake and I'm only doing it justice if I cut a huge big slice. So I love this cake, but I also know that Kevin's favorite so come on in Kevin. Gem, I can't believe you haven't shared the red velvet cake recipe. Yeah, I can't believe I got this far without sharing red velvet cake. But you know what? Some things are just worth the wait. Oh man. I just love how warm this cake makes you feel, especially the combination of the frosting and the cake itself. I added a little bit of cinnamon in there, which isn't always traditional, but I added in there to get a little bit of warmth. Cocoa powder and then with the frosting. It like compares together It's just all delicious. Gem this is your best ever red velvet cake. And on that note, head over to my website for the recipe and make sure you check out all of my other video recipes on YouTube 'cause we've got tons of them. Gem I’m going through this whole slice. Yeah, that's OK. That’s what it’s there for.