As it turns out, baking a Red Velvet Cake in Baja presents a challenge for
Susie Homemaker.
The recipe calls for two cups of cake flour. Can’t find any around here or in Todos Santos. What is cake flour anyway? How does it differ from regular flour? I go to the best cookbook ever, The Joy of Cooking, for the answer.
Apparently, cake flour is made of soft wheats with less expansive gluten. It is not making me happy when I find out that the flour I have is in no way going to give me the results I’m after. But hey! You do what you can, so I followed the substitution directions to use one cup, minus 2 tablespoons of flour to equal one cup of the real thing.
There is no buttermilk to be found around here either. The substitution for this is to use milk and add vinegar to it. Okay, I’ve used this before with satisfactory results. It is clear I will not be working for perfection here. 3/4 cup of buttermilk coming up.
Oh no! The recipe calls for three tablespoons of Dutch processed cocoa and all I have is Hershey’s (that I brought from the USA). I’m three for three.
The rest of the ingredients are in my pantry or refrigerator, so I’m going to give this a go and make the best of it. It’s only a cake after all.
Ingredients:
3 medium beets
3/4 cup unsalted butter
juice of one lemon
2 tsp. of white vinegar
1-1/8 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1-3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
Rather than using a bottle of red food coloring (yuck), I am using three medium beets. Yep! That’s what I said. I roasted the beets yesterday and after they cooled, I peeled them and put them in the refrigerator.
Beats are tasty, but I never thought of putting them in a cake. They have a pretty earthy flavor. Wow! These guys (the beets) are super red. Deep purple—almost. This reminds me of a rock band from Great Britain back in the 70s. I can’t name any of their hits, but I remember the group—Deep Purple, and that they played hard rock.
I hope my cake isn’t hard as a rock.
This cake is a challenge for me here in Baja. I do not have all the key ingredients, or a food processor, and I don’t have any round cake pans (or any cake pans at all). I will be substituting square pans that aren’t even the same size as each other. And I’ll be using a blender instead of a food processor. Oh well.
I will call this a Deep Purple Substitute for a Red Velvet Cake. It is making me happy to merely “go with the flow” like this. It shows that I’m not a perfectionist, which, if you know me, is not news. I have been known to be picky about some things, but I am not seeking perfection in anything. In fact, the older I get the more I tolerate imperfection in my life. I like that saying, “It is what it is.”
Lest you start believing I am a Polly Anna, I want to set the record straight: I used to be a Polly Anna, but no more. I have seen what evil lurks in the hearts of men (and women), and I am a realist now, or as close to that as I can get. You might say I am a recovering Polly Anna.
Enough of that. Let’s whip up this (substitute) cake. First, wash your hands. Prepare the cake pans (or whatever you’re using) and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Blend (because remember, I don’t have a food processor either) the beets, buttermilk (my substitute), juice of a lemon, vanilla, and (two more teaspoons) vinegar. Set this aside.
Sift the dry ingredients and the cocoa into another bowl. That means I’ll be using two ingredients in this part that are posing as the real things—reg. flour and Hershey’s cocoa. This also means there is yet another bowl to wash.
Beat the butter and sugar together and add the eggs one at a time, scraping the bowl between each addition of egg. This part is my favorite because it comes out so creamy and pretty. I like the sound of the beater fluffing everything up.
You start with a little of the dry ingredients in the mixer, then add a little of the beet mixture and lastly the fluffy part: eggs, butter and sugar. After alternating like this, adding a little of each, you end with the dry ingredients.
Once it is all mixed together, you pour half into each of your cake pans (my two square pans that aren’t the same size). I put parchment paper in the pans first and the cake will be easy to remove this way.
Lovingly place these into the preheated oven and bake for 20 + or – minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. I had to bake mine for 30 minutes.
These did not rise very well and the cake is spongy and dense, not crumbly, which is because I didn’t have cake flour I suppose. However, I am moving forward, letting the cake cool in the pans completely before frosting.
Cream cheese frosting is so decadent.
1/2 cup unsalted butter at room temp.
1 lb of cream cheese, also at room temp.
6 cups (I used 3) of powdered sugar (In Mexico they call it azucar glass.)
1 1/2 tsp vanilla–here I am proud to say I have the real thing.
Mexicans cook with real vainilla (Spanish spelling–pronounced vah ee nee’ ya) instead of that horrible bourbon vanilla from Costco I used when I lived in the States. Believe me, the difference is amazing.
After you cream the butter and cream cheese together, you add the vainilla and azucar glass. I used my mixer to do this and the icing is divine. Plenty of sugar even cut in half. Next time, however, I am going to use some lemon peel in it. I think it would be even better with the lemon flavor added.
My husband said that after all the trouble HE went through to get the powdered sugar (it isn’t easily found here), he wanted a piece of cake BEFORE dinner. Not a chance, Gregorio! You have to eat your dinner first: Shredded beef with horseradish sour cream, garlic mashers, cherry tomatoes, and picked beens and asparagus (thanks to our next door neighbor’s “Blaze’s pickled veggies.”) Not a tough thing for him to swallow, so he didn’t protest. I, however, do not eat meat, except fish, so I had left-over tequila lime sauce on fish, instead of beef. Yum. BTW, when you heat something with alcohol in it, you lose all the alcohol. Not to worry–I remain sober! (36 years in April)
*****
Here’s the cake with some pieces out of it. It’s pretty. It’s tasty, but I’m not as happy about it as I could be. It’s too dense (I relate) and I think it’s “the flour business,” plus the fact that I think I used too much of the blended beets. I was supposed to blend them first and measure out a cup. I didn’t do that. Shame on me. Because I just threw in all three medium beets with the rest of the liquid ingredients, I probably ended up with 2 cups of beets. That’s my guess. I also have a feeling that my baking powder is old. I bought it here in Mexico and it isn’t labeled with an expiration date that I can find.
It’s definitely not the worst cake in the world, but it’s not the greatest one either. Will I make it again? Probably, but not for awhile. Maybe I’ll make one for Mom when I visit her in San Diego for her 99th birthday. She was born March 16, 1916. Wow! It will make a nice birthday cake with all the correct ingredients, and I’ll measure the beets next time.
We know how.
