Red velvet birthday cake

It was my brother's girlfriends birthday this weekend so, as I use any excuse to bake, I volunteered to make her a cake. As we're Chinese I thought a red cake would be a great idea as the colour red is a lucky colour to us! Happy Birthday Christine!

I decided to make the red velvet cake from the hummingbird bakery cook book, which is a recipe for cupcakes that you double for a three tier cake.

It's reasonably simple as a recipe to follow although I couldn't buy any buttermilk so I just googled for a buttermilk substitute, and mixed some plain yoghurt with milk in a ratio of 3:1. I also didn't have the liquid food colouring the recipe requests, so I used some red food paste instead, this was a different consistency so this was a bit of a test!

First job was to cream the butter and sugar, then add in the eggs. Then in a separate bowl I was supposed to mix the food colouring, cocoa and vanilla extract into a smooth paste. There wasn't really enough liquid to do this as I used paste not liquid colouring so I just made do, in hindsight I think I should have added a touch of the buttermilk to this just so I could have added in a smoother paste as the cocoa went in a bit lumpy and could have been smoother. Anyway, I then added in my 'paste' followed by half the buttermilk, then half the flour, then the rest of the buttermilk and the rest of the flour. Finally I added in the salt, bicarbonate of soda and white wine vinegar. Mixed it until it was smooth, I then divided this between my three tins and put them in the oven for 25 mins. They had cooked perfectly at this point so I took them out and let them cool before icing.

This was quite tricky and I have made this cream cheese frosting before for the carrot cake and it was far too runny. Looked like a cat had thrown up on my cake... Anyway I was a bit nervous, but decided to stick faithfully to the recipe. The recipe does say to mix it, in the icing sugar and butter, then put all of the cream cheese in in one go. Then you put it on high in the mixer for 5 mins but not too long as it can go runny. So this time as soon as the frosting mixture was smooth, I stopped mixing. This worked loads better, the cream cheese frosting was still thick and would not run down the cake at all.

First I leveled the cakes, the bottom and middle layer I had to slice the top off in order to get quite a level surface to balance the next layer on. Then I sandwiched the cakes with the icing and them had to ice the outside. I tried to do a thin layer of icing first to get rid of the all the small crumbs of cake then a thicker layer of icing on the top to cover this as the final finish. This did work a bit better but not as well as I hoped, there were still a few crumbs that I could see in the icing. To try and get a bit of a finish to the iciny I used a palette knife around the sides from bottom to top, and swirled it across the top as well. I also used some of the scraps of cake to get some crumbs to decorate across the top and here it is!

Its a very sweet cake as both the cake and the icing are super sweet, but its very moist and a nice celebration cake. Here you can see the three layers and the frosting*:

And here is a picture of the whole cake with the crumbled red velvet on the top and my attempt at icing!

* Unfortunately I keep forgetting to take pictures during the earlier stages to post, must try harder next time!