The Secret to Making a Great Red Velvet Cake

My Mom always made a killer red velvet cake. Her RV cakes were moist, rich, and almost creamy on the inside. But the real secret was the flavor. It wasn’t chocolate, that’s for sure!

I have spent years looking at red velvet cake recipes all over the Internet and they are just absolutely awful. How do people eat these dry dusty cakes and enjoy them? Yuck!

My Mom always said that the secret to making a rich, moist red velvet cake was to use white cake mix. That’s right: WHITE CAKE MIX. And not just any white cake mix. It has to be the white cake mix that they use for those super moist wedding cakes.

You die the cake mix red, obviously, but forget adding cocoa powder into it. Mom used fruit flavors or real fruits: strawberries, cherries, real red stuff. I mean, the kids would come out of the woodwork when she was making these cakes.

So here is what set me to think about red velvet cakes. I found this site where the author must have known my mom:

One type of cake a lot of people ruin is Red Velvet Cake. The most common cakes call for using a basic chocolate cake mix and red food coloring. What a horrible recipe! That isn’t red velvet cake. It’s cardboard city! If you want to make a really good Red Velvet Cake you have to use white cake mix — the kind they use for super moist wedding cakes. It helps to add a little Strawberry extract to the mix, too. So your Red Velvet Cake may come out looking and tasting a bit like a Strawberry cake. Some people use Cherry extract instead of Strawberry. The secret is to use a real fruity flavor but don’t let it become too strong. You want a subtle mix.

I don’t know about using extract. My Mom used real strawberries most of the time.

The frosting is still cream cheese. People make the mistake of putting their strawberries in the cream cheese. What’s up with that? You go to all the trouble of making some stupid chocolate cake and dying it red so you can put the flavor into the frosting? No way!

A well-made red velvet cake really doesn’t need the frosting. It’s velvety on the inside because it is moist and full of fruity flavor! That’s right!

So why did so many people latch on to these really yucky red velvet cake recipes? I don’t know. But I’m doing what I can to spread the word: STOP MAKING BAD RED VELVET CAKES! From now on, promise yourself you’ll only make the richest, moistest, most flavorful red velvet cake possible!

These are great holiday cakes and people love to bake them all through November and December. I hope I have helped start a new family tradition by raising the bar on quality for red velvet cakes! Just say NO! to those horrible, dry-as-cardboard chocolate-based red velvet cakes!