Red Velvet Cake with cream cheese frosting and homemade chocolate truffles

Recipe of the week……….Red Velvet Cake

For those of you who know me quite well, will know that there is one thing in the kitchen that I really really don’t like doing more than other things and that is baking cakes, well it always turns out that I get asked to please bake the birthday cakes and always end up saying, sure no problem, well a dirty little secret, its not a problem, I just don’t like to measure things out and that’s why I generally don’t like baking cakes, but from what I have been told this one was a real show stopper, so I thought I would share it for those of you who like to bake.

This recipe was for 40 people, if you would like to scale it down, divide everything by 4 and that will yield a cake big enough to serve 12 easy. Good luck and enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Difficulty: Medium to Hard

Prep time: 25 mins

Cooking time: 35 mins

Serves: 40 people

Ingredients for Red Velvet Cake

1kg Cake flour

4 tsp baking soda

4 tsp baking powder

4 tsp salt

½ cup cocoa powder

2kg white sugar

1lt oil

8 eggs

5 cups buttermilk

6 vanilla pods scrapped

6 bottles red food coloring

4 tsp white spirit vinegar

2 cups hot strong black coffee (this is for you not the cake, just joking its for the cake)

Method

Preheat oven to 160˚c

In a very large bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, baking powder, cocoa powder and salt.

In a separate large bowl mix together the sugar and oil.

Then mix in the eggs, buttermilk, vanilla and red food coloring, coffee and vinegar until well combined.

Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients a little at time, mixing after each addition, just until combined.

Butter and flour 3 x 25cm cake tins or 4 x 20cm cake tins, place then in the freezer for 5 minutes just until the butter hardens

Dived the cake batter evenly into the cake tins you have chosen to use.

Place them in the oven and have 4 shots of tequila and hope it doesn’t flop, just kidding, bake for about 30 minutes, when you insert a toothpick is should come out fairly dry from the middle of the cake.

Let cool on a cooling rack until the pan are warm to the touch.

Slide a knife or offset spatula around the inside of the pans to loosen the cake from the pan.

Remove the cakes from the pan and let them cool.

Now comes the fun part for me partly because you don’t have to be exact with your measurements and you know get to see how well you can hide any mistakes you have made on the exterior of the cake

Ingredients for Cream Cheese Frosting

2,5kg Cream cheese

500g unsalted butter

10 cups icing sugar

4 vanilla pods scrapped

Zest and juice from 2 lemons

Method

Whisk all the ingredients together until light and fluffy.

Then you can ice the cake to your hears desire, this one in the picture is 3 layers with frosting in between each layer, and for added WOW factor some homemade chocolate truffles on top, but these are not for the faint hearted to make as I have used a 70% couverture chocolate that is not tempered and still have to be tempered, but here is the recipe anyway for those of you that are keen to try it out.

Ingredients for chocolate truffles

1kg Lindt 70% chocolate

500ml double cream

Cocoa for rolling in

Method

You need to melt the chocolate over a double boiler whilst mixing continuously until the chocolate reaches 45˚c then you need to cool it down to 27˚c and then bring it back up to 31˚c, then work with it. The main problem is if you over shoot the mark, you are going to have to start all over again.

Once you have tempered it add in the cream and mix thoroughly and quickly as it will thicken very quickly, then place it in the fridge for about 4 hours, take out and heat up a melon baller in some hot water and scoop out little chocolate balls, roll in the palm of your hand to get out any defects and then roll it in the cocoa, arrange then all over the top of the cake, this cake here has 100 of them on it.