Red Velvet Cake
I made an awful cake over the weekend. Using an untested Times recipe, I blundered through the process and produced one of the worst tasting cakes in the history of cakedom.
While I generally work with butter as a shortening in my cakes, this one asked for Canola oil. In addition to baking powder, this recipe needed vinegar. Let’s not talk about the $9.00 worth of red food coloring…..
Somehow, the cake came out tasting slightly of fish.
Did I have some residue in the oven from the stuffed fillet of sole we made the other night? Was the canola oil rancid? Does red food coloring come from the sea? Did someone lay a trout across the cake pan just before I poured the batter? I don’t know.
The frosting recipe seemed to work and I reluctantly applied it to the cake even though I suspected something was off after they came out of the oven. If I were a better baker I would have trashed the first cakes and remade them. I was pressed for time. I had to prepare a birthday party and I just couldn’t spare the extra hour.
So how can I move forward from disaster? Everyone was very nice about the cake but no one had seconds. The cake looked pretty, funny aftertaste though.
I’ll try it again with butter maybe or with a different food color.
It’s a setback…….
posted by Champurrado at 9:10 AM
8 Comments:
We're cursed. It's not the lack of access to prenatal care in North Dakota; it's not the lack of freedome of expression in North Buncombe, North Carolina. No. The Champ cooked a bad cake. The world is coming to an end. I feel very bad about this. Very bad indeed.
So sorry you had to suffer through this.
But I have to add, because the Dane in me has to point out, it is statistically, factually, and regiously impossible to bake a decent pastry, cookie, or cake with any fat product other than actual real butter. Canola oil? That is just wrong, wrong, wrong. You probably need to go to church and confess. It will take more than a few Hail Mary's to make up for that one. If Jewish, there will be a lot to atone for on the days of atonement.
See, that's what I mean. Untested. I'll mark it up to experience I suppose.
Fish? That is TOO Funny.
Just rememeber Champ, when cooking baked dessert thingys, sometimes lard, but mostly butter. Butter, butter, butter. It's better. Recipes that call for oil along with sugar and eggs are normally from the same cookbook that tell you to add a can of mushroom soup or Campbell's chicken bouillon rather than make bouillon from stock or a white sauce or real cream soup with mushrooms. You know that.
Rachael, Ms. Foil:
Thanks for the kind words. It's on to the next cake. I'm over it.
Did someone have a March birthday?
Are you sure you aren't April foolin us? - dd
Ah, the Red Velvet Cake. A staple of the American South. A chiffon-type cake, hence the oil, which doesn't add volume the way butter would, so you really gotta whip those egg whites. I understand some people use beets for the coloring. Perhaps then it would taste more like beets and less like fish.
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