Tickled Pink Over Red Velvet

This cake is a staple at potlucks and reunions.

By LUANNE AUSTIN
PHOTOS BY HOLLY MARCUS

It’s so good and so bad. Regardless, red velvet cake is in.

Shenandoah Valley folks have been enjoying the blood-red confection for decades. It shows up regularly at church potlucks, club meetings and family occasions. Now bakeries all over New York City have discovered it. Red velvet cake is selling like hotcakes. Noting the trend in a February New York Times article, Florence Fabricant writes, “It’s a cake that can stop traffic. The layers are an improbable red that can vary from a fluorescent pink to a dark ruddy mahogany. The color, often enhanced by buckets of food coloring, becomes even more eye-catching set against clouds of snowy icing, like a slash of glossy lipstick framed by platinum blond curls.”

The origin of red velvet cake is hard to pin down. There’s an urban legend that claims to explain how the cake became popular. In “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” Jan Brunvand writes:

Our friend, Dean Blair, got on a bus in San Jose one morning and shortly after, a lady got on the bus and started passing out these 3 x 5 cards with the recipe for “Red Velvet Cake.” She said she had recently been in New York and had dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria and had this cake. After she returned to San Jose, she wrote to the hotel asking for the name of the chef who had originated the cake, and if she could have the recipe.

Subsequently she received the recipe in the mail along with a bill for something like $350 from the chef. She took the matter to her attorney, and he advised her that she would have to pay it because she had not inquired beforehand if there would be a charge for the service, and if so, how much it would be.

Consequently, she apparently thought this would be a good way to get even with the chef.

A resurgence in the popularity of this cake is partly attributed to the 1989 film “Steel Magnolias,” in which the groom’s cake (another Southern tradition) is a red velvet cake made in the shape of an armadillo, albeit with gray icing.

Gloria Markley, church secretary at Wakeman’s Grove Church of the Brethren in Edinburg, concurs. She remembers it becoming popular around 20 years ago. About 15 years ago she got a recipe for red velvet cake from her then-pastor’s wife, Doris Knicely. Gloria, now 60, has been baking it ever since for family birthdays and holidays. Along with the recipe, Doris passed along a few tips to Gloria (see recipe). Gloria thinks that’s what sets this recipe apart.

What sets red velvet cake apart from other cakes—aside from the two bottles of food coloring—is the buttermilk, vinegar and cocoa. In his book, “American Cookery,” James Beard writes that the reaction of acidic vinegar with buttermilk tends to turn cocoa a reddish color and that before Dutch processed cocoa became widely used, the cocoa had a more red color. This natural tinting may have been the origin of red velvet as well as devil’s food cake. Some cooks are unwilling to use the required two bottles of red food coloring and instead use beet juice.

“You can buy cake mixes now for red velvet cake,” says Gloria. “But it’s not the same.”

Get the recipe for Red Velvet Cake