Red Velvet Birthday Cake

Recently a friend of mine celebrated a birthday, and I took the occasion as a chance to try out one of the many fabulous celebration cakes smitten kitchen has posted on her blog. (If you're wondering where I am when not posting on my blog, there's a good chance I'm reading hers.)

I chose to try my hand at Red Velvet Cake, as it seemed to have the best balance between being fun and birthday-like, while still being classy. The bottom line on this recipe: it was somewhat time-consuming, but a huge hit and it made my friend feel very special, so it was a good choice.

Now for the blow-by-blow. The recipe is a 3-layer cake, so I borrowed my mom's cake pans and was glad I did, because they have this little thing you run around the rim of the pan to get the layers out. I also lined the pans with parchment, per directions. (Post to follow where I did not follow these directions.) Getting ingredients was also interesting--cake flour was hard to find at Fareway, but the butcher was able to find it for me. I ended up going to Hyvee for the red food coloring, because it called for 3 oz (one of the largish bottles is 1 oz), and all you get at Fareway were those multipacks. I figured I'd have to buy like 20 multipacks to get enough. I did cut it down to 2 oz, and was satisfied with the result.

To explain the pictures, from top left, clockwise: The frosting is cream cheese frosting, and I made a double batch so as to be able to do a crumb coat, as seen here and explained here (you need to read this post if you want to do layer cakes!)--especially important with white frosting and red crumbs. The final coat was not perfect, but pretty close, as you can see in the third picture. The 2nd--well, my fingers got really red, as did pretty much everything in the kitchen. I was thankful for bleach for my towels, and I used paper towels to immediately wipe up the counter.

Decorating: I put a cookie cutter in the middle and sprinkled red sprinkles in the middle, spreading it around with a pastry brush. Then I tinted a bit of frosting and put dots all around the edge. Dots and circles are all the rage these days, for reasons I don't entirely understand.

The last two pictures are just to show how messy my counter got, and how I cleaned it all up in a matter of minutes thanks to my fabulous dishwasher. I love my new kitchen and its appliances!