Red Velvet Cake

Preheat oven to 350F Cream the butter until it’s smooth. Add sugar and cream together until incorporated. Add eggs, mix until incorporated, one egg at a time. Add the vanilla and food colouring. Mix until incorporated In a separate bowl, sift the flour, cocoa powder and salt together. Add 1/3 of the dry mixture at a time to the wet mixture, alternating with 1/3 of the buttermilk. This way you don’t overwork the ingredients trying to incorporate them all at once. In a separate bowl, mix baking soda and vinegar and let them react. Add the mixture to the cake batter Prepare two 9-inch round cake pans by greasing them, then lining the bottom with parchment paper. Divide the batter between the two pans. Jostle them until the cake batter is evenly distributed in the pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean when poked in the middle. Meanwhile, make the icing by creaming the butter and cream cheese until smooth. Add the vanilla and icing sugar, and mix until smooth. Taste test to make sure it tastes delicious Store the icing in the fridge when not in use. Remove from the oven, and let rest for 10 minutes in the pan. Remove the cake from the pan, remove the parchment paper liner and let cool completely, right-side up. Once completely cool, trim off the top of the cake to make it flat. (I didn’t do a very good job of this) Stack the cakes, cut side down on a cake circle (or plate, or cake platter, whichever you have). Add a bit of icing to the bottom to make sure the cake doesn’t go anywhere as you ice the cake. Spread icing on the middle, at the top layer, cut side down, and “dirty ice it” as Buddy Valastro says, or do what’s called a crumb coat. Just a coat to cover the cake and keep the moisture in. Refrigerate for about 20 minutes before you complete the rest of the icing. Ice the cake to whatever way pleases you. For the ruffles, I used a Wilton 104 tip, the thicker side closer to the cake and the thinner side facing outwards, and just went back and forth to make that ruffle effect. I ran out of icing to finish the top, so maybe use a 102 or 103 tip to conserve icing. Another design you can do provided you have the right tip, is pipe roses all over. It’s soooo pretty. You can see what it looks like here, but I think you’d have to use a smaller cake pan to achieve the right height for roses on the side.