[Elise] Sunset Velvet Cake

For my last piece for the food coloring month of April, I decided to go out with a bang. I baked all afternoon to make what I have decided to call Sunset Velvet Cake. It's like Red Velvet Cake but a little bit different.

Basically, I took a pretty standard Red Velvet recipe and tweaked it a bit. Because all of my round pans are different sized, I split the recipe in half and baked each layer separately (making three half recipes total).

For each layer I accidentally used way too little food coloring... 1 tsp instead of 1 oz. BIG difference. You would think I would have noticed something was up when the first layer was pink and not red... oh well.

The way the recipe said to add obscene amounts of food coloring was by mixing it with the buttermilk. This is a third of the way through adding the buttermilk and flour mix alternately.

To be able to get the pan ready for the next layer as quickly as possible I lined the pan with parchement paper by clamping the springform over the square piece of paper and then trimming the edges off.

Here I just moved the orange cake to a cookie sheet to cool while I spread the yellow cake in the pan.

While the third cake was in the oven I made the frosting. I doubled my standard cream cheese frosting, then made it delightfully yellow.

One 10" Round Layer
bake 25 min at 350F

1 1/4 c. cake flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. cocoa powder
1/4 c. butter
3/4 c. white sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. orange extract
1/2 c. buttermilk
1 Tbsp. food coloring*

*Food coloring: So, if you like what you see in this cake I actually used 1 tsp. red in the bottom layer, 1/2 tsp each of red and yellow in the middle layer, and 1 tsp yellow plus a few drops of red in the top layer. However, I had originally planed on having each layer being the intensity of red velvet cake, to do that the recipe called for one ounce of food coloring per layer. After seeing how intense these came out with 1/6 the food coloring the should have had, I think a compromise between the two amounts is best, hence 1 Tbsp. So:

Bottom layer: 1 Tbsp. red
Middle layer: 1 tsp. red + 2 tsp. yellow
Top layer: 1 Tbsp. yellow



Frosting the cake was really fun. The layers were stiff enough that the parchment peeled off nicely and they could be stacked quite easily (you could pick a whole layer up carefully and not have to do anything fancy to keep it from breaking). I had no problems with crumbs getting in the frosting, after having let each layer sit in the fridge until completely cool. Finally, I garnished the cake with some strawberries I had left from the strawberry-rhubarb cake (I honestly don't know why I hadn't finished them sooner!)

I was so worried about how the inside would look and how the orange would taste with the chocolate. Turns out I didn't have too much to worry about; It was beautiful and delicious.

While this cake was so scrumptious, I am so caked out. No more cakes until graduation. I don't even know if I'll bake anything before graduation. This was my last hurrah (for now) and now it's time to buckle down and get some work done. With that in mind I am declaring May 'fun Summer drinks month!'

Yum!