Next on the list of Raymond’s work people to prepare a birthday cake for was Craig one of the directors, he had asked not to have a chocolate cake as the office is a bit over the overly sweet cakes, so after sifting through recipes I went for an American Classic (Apparently) Red Velvet Cake;

2 layer Red Velvet with Cream Cheese Icing

The reason I decided on this one is that I thought it could be easily adapted to be less sweet and be better suited to what he had asked for but with the red colouring it would still have some WOW factor. I did an extensive Internet search and some research as I could not find a single recipe that was the same so in the end I settled on one I found on allrecipes.com.au.

The first thing I noticed about this one is that the recipe called for 6 eggs! that’s way more than most cakes, but having not made this cake before I followed the suggestion. I did make a few tweeks to the recipe and omitted the cocoa powder and replaced with plain flour to mix with the red food colouring. I also used 50ml of food colouring to make sure I got a bright Red colour, I used 2 1/2 cups of sugar rather than 3 cups as this seemed like a lot of sugar to me.

While the result of the was a very red cake, while it was baking it had the definite whiff of scrambled eggs, I know at this point that the number of eggs was definitely off, however I let it cool and then levelled off the cakes and had a little taste of the excess, personally I didn’t like it, I felt that the eggs had overwhelmed the taste and perhaps I had made a bit of an error by not using 3 cups of sugar. I gave Raymond some and he declared that it was delicious and that he loved the eggy flavour and reminded him more of Asian cakes, So with that verdict I continued on rather than start the whole thing again I deduced that once the whole cake was assembled it would have the sweetness of the icing to counterbalance the more savoury taste of the cake.

When it came to the frosting, I followed the recipe but I replaced the almond extract with coconut extract, the result however was gluey fowl tasting mess, so I tipped the whole lot down the sink and started from scratch and went with cream cheese frosting and a passion-fruit cream cheese filling.

for the filling

• 100g cream cheese (You could use Philadelphia for a lighter option)
• 50g of soft butter
• 3 tbs of Passion-fruit pulp
• Icing sugar (Not sure of the amount)

Looking Good!

So it turns out that everyone loved it and liked the non sickly sweet flavour, so despite my misgivings another resounding success, however If I do this one again I will only use 3 eggs and use all 3 cups of sugar..

Till Next Time.. Eat Well

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