I was recently asked to bake a red velvet cake for my friend's son's bar mitzvah. I've been underwhelmed with my standard recipe the last couple of times I made it, so I started to wonder: is red velvet cake just not that good? Or is this recipe lacking? I did some research and came up with a couple of contenders to pit against each other: my usual recipe, the recipe from the bakery I used to work at, and two others, one from Food Network and the other from Divas Can Cook. I made six-inch cakes of each and colored them different colors so I could remember which was which.
Top left, Food Network; top right, Divas; bottom left, old recipe (which is from Pinch My Salt); bottom right, Hotcakes. Surprisingly, I found my old recipe and the Food Network recipe bland, tasteless, and dry. The best two by far were Divas and Hotcakes - and I enjoyed Hotcakes's recipe the most! Red velvet doesn't have that deep a taste - it only uses a couple of tablespoons of cocoa powder, so it's not really a chocolate cake - but the right recipe can taste light and fresh. I paired it with my regular cream cheese frosting recipe (more on cream cheese frosting with fondant in a future post!).
On to the main event. Due to COVID, many bar and bat mitzvah celebrations have been drastically reduced in size and scope. For this one, the immediate family was going to eat lunch back at their house, and they just needed a simple cake for 20 or so people. I wasn't asked to do any special kind of decoration, but I wanted to add some kind of festive element, so I made a little bunting with duct tape, paper straws and ribbon, and I jazzed up the edges with rainbow sprinkles.
Mazel tov, Simon and family! Thanks for letting me be part of your day!
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