Red Velvet Bars | vegan, gluten-free, healthy cake recipe - Elavegan (2024)

FAQs

What cocoa powder to use for red velvet? ›

The Best Cocoa for Red Velvet Cake Is Natural Cocoa

Natural cocoa is the best cocoa for red velvet cake for two reasons. With a higher acidity, natural cocoa works with the cake's baking soda and buttermilk to leaven the cake to a tight, tender crumb. The results are an almost melt-in-your-mouth tender cake.

When raw cocoa powder reacts with acidic ingredients such as buttermilk and vinegar, it turns dark red. Although, the resulting cake is more of a ruddy brown color and not the gaudy red color you get from using food coloring.

Red Velvet Cake is flavored with non-Dutch processed cocoa, buttermilk, and vinegar. What makes this unique is that its red color is the result of a natural chemical reaction. The buttermilk and vinegar cause a reaction that brings out cocoa's anthocyanin. Anthocyanin ia a pigment found in cocoa beans and other plants.

Roasted beets are pureed and incorporated into the cake batter to not only color the cake but also impart tenderness and a natural sweetness with no weird taste!

Dutch-Processed Cocoa Powder

It makes amazingly rich, dark, and tender cakes, fudgy, moist brownies and cookies, and incredibly luscious frosting.

The red food colouring makes the cake batter prone to splitting, and turns everything it touches red; a couple of grams over on the cocoa powder and the cake goes brown instead of a rich red; the cream cheese frosting has a tendency to turn to gloop at the very last minute for no apparent reason; and the list goes on.

Now for the science-y part: natural cocoa powder is highly acidic. Because of this, it's usually paired with baking soda, which neutralizes the acid and encourages your baked goods to rise (you see this at play in my Texas sheet cake).

The compounds that give cocoa powder its flavor are less volatile than those in ground spices, which lose much of their flavor and aroma after about a year. The more volatile the molecule, the more rapidly it evaporates and degrades.

Is it necessary to use vinegar when baking red velvet cake? If you don't want to use vinegar, you can substitute an equal amount of lemon juice. If you want to skip the acidic liquid altogether, you can substitute a tablespoon of baking powder for each teaspoon of baking soda.

Unfortunately some red food colours have a bitter taste because of the ingredients used, particularly the colourant red #3 (E127). So it may help to check the ingredients of the red food colour or use a red food colour paste that is sold as "no taste".

Why is vinegar used in red velvet cake? ›

When bakers added vinegar, baking soda, or buttermilk to their recipes to tenderize the cakes, the acid in those ingredients reacted with the cocoa, which was not Dutch-processed, to give the cakes a red tint. That color became a signature of velvet cakes.

The cocoa powder is used in less quantity and the taste develops by the mixing of vinegar and buttermilk with the cocoa powder. The recipe involves many ingredients in small quantity. The frosting- if used cream cheese is an expensive element in itself.

Many years ago, the red color came from the presence of vinegar and buttermilk reacting with the anthocyanins in traditional cocoa powder. But for most of the last few decades, the red color has been supplied by Red #40 dye, in part because cocoa powder used now is alkalized to neutralize its acidity.

Red dye 40, made from petroleum, is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in foods and drinks. But some studies have linked artificial food dyes like red dye 40 to hyperactivity, including ADHD. Some studies show a link between dyes and increased ADHD or hyperactivity in children.

To retain the proper color and taste, it is best to stick to natural cocoa powder when making red velvet cake. You could use carob powder, dutch processed cocoa powder (with strong red gel food coloring) but I do not recommend using any other substitute.

We would suggest using a cocoa powder from a quality chocolate maker and there are several different ones around. Green & Black's is available in many countries and Valrhona is also widely distributed. In the US Ghiradelli is another good brand (sometimes this is sold as "baking cocoa").

Making Chocolate Ice Cream With Dutch-Process Cocoa Powder

There's the standard ice cream base of milk, cream, and sugar, to which is added two levels of chocolate. In order to deepen the ice cream flavor, both actual melted chocolate and a Dutch-process cocoa powder and sugar infusion are added to the base mixture.

Dutch-Process Cocoa Powder (Alkalized Cocoa)

So, dutch-process cocoa powder is neutral. Because it is neutral, it does not react with baking soda. It's often paired with baking powder.

While red velvet cake is technically a cocoa cake, there is a key difference between standard chocolate cake and red velvet cake. Chocolate cake recipes traditionally use Dutch-processed cocoa, while red velvet cake uses unprocessed cocoa, a more acidic ingredient that produces a deeper, more intense chocolate flavor.