Red Velvet Cake

This recipe is basically double the cupcake recipe. It's a huge cake. I've baked it just in one tin, but normally it's baked in two or three. My oven at university isn't big enough for this but I think it worked well in one tin and my friend's birthday cake still looked great!

Ingredients:

250g Butter
600g Sugar
6 eggs
4 tbs Cocoa Powder
1 tsp Red Food Colouring Paste (Or 5 tbs of Red Food Colouring)
380g Self Raising Gluten-Free Flour
270ml Buttermilk
2 tsp Vanilla Extract
Large Pinch of Salt

Method:

1. Preheat oven to Preheat oven to 180°c or Gas Mark 5.
2. Cream butter and sugar together.
3. Soft the Cocoa powder into the butter and sugar and mix well. Once combined at the food colouring and vanilla extract.
4. Add the eggs one at a time and mix well. I would use a whisk at this point to get in as much air as possible.
5. Weigh out the dry ingredients and mix together in a bowl.
6. Then alternate between adding the dry ingredients and the buttermilk, folding in the flour so your don't lose the air.
7. Once the mixture is fully combined, pour the mixture in to the round tins (1-3) making sure to smooth the tops.
8. Put in the over for about 30-50 minutes (depending on how many tins you used) until the mixture is slightly browning on top.
9. Remove the tins and leave to cool in the trays for 10 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

10. Once it's fully cooled you can ice and decorate! Traditionally red velvet is made with a cream cheese frosting but because I'm not really a fan (and neither are my friends!) I make them with butter cream. We made this particular cake with vanilla butter cream. So 1 part butter, 2 parts icing sugar and a tsp of vanilla extract. You could cut the cake it half (we didn't have a big enough knife!) and layer buttercream inside the cake as well.

This particular cake I decorated with my friend Harri, it was for our friend Hayley's 21st. We had SO much fun. We used purple ready to roll icing and stuck sugar flowers on the cake. We also made leaves and stems. As you can see the red worked really well with the purple!

- Emma xxx