Pieday Friday ~ My red velvet birthday cake

This week is Cassiefairy’s birthday and to celebrate I’ve baked a cake for a little birthday celebration I’m having in my little vintage caravan. I wanted to break from tradition and avoid my usual victoria sponge cake this year (even though it is my favourite) so I thought about making a red velvet  cake. This would mean that I still got to enjoy the jam and cream that I love about victoria sponge cakes, but I could also have a larger, even more naughty cake with tons of buttercream! See my sponge cake recipe and my red velvet cake recipe is below:

250 grams plain flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda, 100 grams butter, 200 grams caster sugar, 1 heaped tablespoon of red paste food colouring, 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, 2 large eggs, 175 ml milk.

Cream the butter and sugar together before adding the food colouring and vanilla extract – I was a bit careful with the food colouring so my cake was more dark pink velvet than red. The colour of the batter is going to be the colour of the cake and it doesn’t get much darker from baking so make sure you’ve got your desired colour and add more colouring if needed. Add the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of sofa and eggs, mixing together before adding the milk to loosen the batter. Divide the batter into two lined loose-base cake tins, like my ones from Kleeneze and bake at 170 degrees for around 20 minutes. Test with a cocktail stick to see if they are done – if the centres are still gooey and the cocktail stick comes out red, pop the cakes back in the oven and check after 5 minutes.

While I was making this mixture, I thought I would bake a few mini cupcakes, so spooned the red velvet into a pretty pink spotty cardboard case from Wholeport. Once these were cooked, I used a cupcake corer that my brother had given me as a gift to make a hollow in the centre of the cakes, which I filled with more jam! I iced the cakes using icing sugar whipped into cream and used buttercream to decorate the sides of the cake, adding little pink sprinkles that my husband had given me as a birthday treat.

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