Memories of The Grill Room: Red Velvet Cake

Red Velvet Cake

Earlier this summer I had the pleasure of attending the 40th wedding anniversary of two dear friends. One of their daughters had baked the cakes for the celebration lunch: delicious banana cakes. She said she had wanted to make Red Velvet Cake for the occasion (ruby red for the 40th anniversary), but they didn’t work out for her. I told her I had a recipe for Red Velvet Cake and here it is for you, Synove, with a story to go with it, of course.

I was introduced to Red Velvet Cake when I was a kid. It was the treat at the end of many a downtown shopping trip with my nana. (Yes, we went downtown to shop, everybody did. We even took the bus.) Most of the time, we choose our coveted slice from the dessert section of Eaton’s cafeteria, but once in awhile we enjoyed the finer dining experience of Eaton's Grill Room. This recipe produces the cake that I remember.

Like many of the other recipes I share on this blog, I’ve had this one in my wooden recipe box for a long time and don’t know exactly where it originated. At one time, I made it frequently, but then got away from it. In recent years, Red Velvet Cake has enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity. There are plenty of recipes and debate about its origin online. I read an interesting article about this cake at the Sand and Feathers blog.

This is an impressive looking scratch cake baked in three layers. I only had two 8” round baking pans available, so I used an 8” springform pan for one of the layers, and it worked just fine.

You could use a cream cheese frosting on this cake. However, the frosting recipe given here is closest to what I remember of the Eaton’s Red Velvet Cake. It calls for granulated white sugar although I have seen similar frosting recipes that use confectioners or icing sugar. It’s a little grittier in texture with the granulated, but it’s the texture I’ve come to prefer. Whichever frosting you go with, make sure you cool the cakes completely. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to refrigerate them and frost them out right out of the fridge. And, be sure to brush the crumbs off the cake before frosting, so the red stays red and the white stays white. Of course, the white frosting is a perfect canvas for decoration, but the dramatic contrast between the red and the white when you slice into the layers has always been striking enough for me.

MA’s Red Velvet Cake

Preheat oven to 350º F.

Grease and flour 3 – 8-inch round baking pans and place a sheet of parchment paper inside the bottom of each pan for easy removal of the cakes. 

Setting up to make the cakes

½ cup butter
1 ½ cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 oz. red food colouring
2 heaping tbsp cocoa
2 ¼ cups cake flour
1 tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk or soured milk
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vinegar

Cream the butter, sugar and eggs.

Cool completely and brush off crumbs before frosting

Make a paste of the food colouring and cocoa and add it to the creamed mixture.

Sift together the flour and salt. Add to the creamed mixture, alternating with the buttermilk.

Add vanilla.

Blend in the soda and vinegar.

Pour the batter into prepared pans.

Bake 24 to 34 minutes or until tester inserted in centre of each cake comes out clean.

Cool on rack. For further cooling and to make frosting the cake easier, cakes can be refrigerated for one to two hours.

Frost with Frosting for Red Velvet Cake.

Store frosted cake in refrigerator. Can be served cold or brought to room temperature.

Printable Recipe for MA's Red Velvet Cake

MA’s Frosting for Red Velvet Cake

Cook flour and milk until very thick

2 tbsp flour
1 cup milk
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla

In a double boiler or in a bowl set over boiling water, cook the flour and milk, stirring constantly with lots of love, until very thick. Remove from heat and cool completely.

Cream together the sugar, butter and vanilla until very fluffy.

Add the cooled flour and milk mixture to the

Mix until frosting is consistency of whipped cream

creamed mixture and mix until well blended. The frosting will be the constituency of whipped cream.

Makes enough frosting to fill and frost the side and top of one 3-layer cake.

Printable Recipe for MA's Frosting for Red Velvet Cake

Delicious Red Velvet Cake

The Farmers Market and Rhubarb in July

A slice of Lunar Rhubarb Cake

Rhubarb and spring go together. I don’t have a rhubarb patch of my own and didn’t manage to raid any from my patch-blessed friends this spring, so when I came across some beautiful rhubarb at a local farmers market in July, I couldn’t resist taking home a few bunches.

The Mallard as seen from Petersfield Market

The market I speak of is a recent addition in our part of the world and I highly recommend it. The vendors are friendly and the variety of offerings they bring together range from handmade bags and quilts, baked goods, funky furniture for your deck, local produce, and much, much more. You’ll find it every summer Sunday from 11 am to 3 pm in Petersfield, in the park beside the big mallard statue. I plan to return there throughout the season. Wherever you are, support your local farmers market.

But back to the rhubarb and today’s recipe for Lunar Rhubarb Cake. I love this cake. It is rich in spices, buttery, easy to make and serves a crowd. The recipe came from a Canadian Living magazine in the early 1980s. I googled it before this writing and you can still find a rhubarb cake recipe on the Canadian Living website. It’s different from the recipe I’m sharing here, but, knowing how well they test their recipes at Canadian Living, I am sure it will be good if you try it. In my Internet search, I also came across a fabulous looking rhubarb bundt cake on a canadian foodie website. The ingredients were quite similar to this recipe and it looked terrific baked up in the fancy bundt pan. Check it out. Many great recipes and ideas on this Edmonton-based website.

Why Lunar? Because the surface of the baked cake resembles craters on the moon.

Without further ado, here’s the recipe for Lunar Rhubarb Cake.

MA’s Lunar Rhubarb Cake

(Originated in Canadian Living, Summertime Special 1982)

Preheat oven to 350º F.

Butter a 9” x 13” baking pan.

All measured for the batter and the topping

Batter:

½ cup butter

1 ½ cups sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk or soured milk (that's a little less than 1 cup milk with 1 or 2 tbsp of vinegar or lemon juice added to curdle the milk)

2 cups rhubarb, chopped into 1” pieces

1 tbsp flour

Topping:

¼ cup butter

2 tsp cinnamon

1 cup brown sugar, packed

Rhubarb tossed with flour 

In a large mixing bowl or a KitchenAid stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth and creamy.

Beat in egg and vanilla.

Sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Add to creamed mixture alternating with milk – making 3 dry and 2 liquid additions.

Toss rhubarb with 1 tbsp flour and mix gently into batter. This prevents the rhubarb from sticking together in the batter; helps each piece stay separate from the other.

Ready for the oven

Spoon batter into baking pan.

In a medium mixing bowl, blend together the butter, cinnamon and brown sugar. Sprinkle this topping evenly over the surface of the cake.

Bake for 45 minutes or until the cake has risen and browned and comes away from the edges of the pan.

Makes 12 to 18 pieces, depending on how large you want them.

Lunar Rhubarb Cake ready to slice

Printable Recipe for MA's Lunar Rhubarb Cake

My Boyfriend's Birthday Cake

Crispy Rice Layer Cake

Don’t get the wrong idea, folks. This boyfriend-girlfriend relationship is all above board, spouse approved, and largely based on cake - specifically crispy rice cake. When I know my friend needs a little cheering up or most of the time for no special reason, I make him a crispy rice cake.

For his birthday, it was only natural to forgo the usual sheet cake and make him a crispy rice layer cake. It's super easy, quick to make and you won't even heat up the oven. If you want to make one for your boyfriend, here's how.

MA's Crispy Rice Layer Cake

Butter 2 springform pans.

4 tbsp butter

1 package (10 oz) regular marshmallows or 4 cups miniature marshmallows

7 cups crispy rice cereal

1 to 1 ½ cups frosting of your choice

Mixture cooling in springform pans

In a large, microwavable bowl, heat butter and marshmallows on high for 3 minutes, stirring after 2 minutes. If things have not melted down after 3 minutes, microwave in 15 or 20 second intervals, stirring after each, until the mixture is smooth.

Add crispy rice cereal to butter and marshmallow mixture. Stir until all the cereal is well coated. A well-buttered spatula makes stirring easier.

Divide mixture in half and put each half into one pan. Press mixture into pan using the buttered spatula, wax paper or buttered fingers if the mixture is cool enough.

Crispy and good with chocolate frosting!

Leave in pans for 10-15 minutes. Then remove from pans and place onto rack covered with wax paper to dry completely, about an hour.

Place one cake on serving plate and cover top with frosting. Place second cake on top and cover top with frosting. You can cover the sides of the cake if you wish, but I like the look of the cereal cakes.

Serves 8 to 10.

Printable Recipe for MA's Crispy Rice Layer Cake

Take-Along Dark Chocolate Sheet Cake

Looking homely but tasting great: Dark Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Butter Cream Frosting

This is one of those recipes that has been in my little wooden recipe box forever. I return to it whenever I want to make a quick and easy cake and especially if it's a cake that has to do a little travelling. This dark chocolate cake bakes in a 13" x 9" pan and if you're really lucky you have one of these pans with a lid, and if you're really, really lucky your lidded pan fits into one of those padded carriers and comes with its own ice pack.

As I said, this cake is easy to put together. You can mix it up in a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, but the batter is quite thin so it's easy enough to do by hand. When it's fully cooled, you can add icing (I like a chocolate butter cream and the recipe for it follows) or just dust on a little icing sugar. I recommend storing this cake in the refrigerator and serving it while it's still a little chilled. The chocolatey cake is moist and tasty by itself and is also an excellent base for a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a few strawberries.

MA's Dark Chocolate Sheet Cake

Ingredients ready and pan greased and floured

Preheat oven to 350 F.
Grease and flour a 13" x 9" x 2" pan.

2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cups cocoa
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk or soured milk
1 cup strong black coffee
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla

Beat for 2 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine sugar, flour, cocoa, baking soda and baking powder.

Add eggs, milk, coffee, oil and vanilla.

Beat at medium speed for 2 minutes. Batter will be thin.

Don't worry: the batter should be thin.

Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake 35 to 40 minutes or until tester poked into centre of cake comes out clean. The middle of the cake may have a sag but as long as the tester comes out clean, it's done. The saggy middle will be disguised by the frosting.

Cool cake completely in pan.

Frost with chocolate butter cream icing or dust with icing sugar.

Store in refrigerator and serve slightly chilled.

Makes about 12 servings.

Printable Recipe for MA's Dark Chocolate Sheet Cake

MA's Chocolate Butter Cream Frosting

2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
3 tbsp cocoa
2-3 tbsp cream or milk
1/2 tsp vanilla

Cream butter.

Sift together icing sugar and cocoa.

Add sugar and cocoa mixture to butter, alternating with cream or milk.

Blend in vanilla and beat until creamy.

Spread onto cooled cake.

Makes icing for 13" x 9" sheet cake. Double the recipe for a layer cake.

Printable Recipe for MA's Chocolate Butter Cream Frosting

Medivnyk: A Honey of a Cake

Sweet little honey cake drizzled with glaze

A few weeks ago my mom, who is a funny, warm and well-intentioned eighty-one year old, started talking about honey cake and how she’d like to make one on a day when she was feeling up to it. With that, she planted a seed. (I think her intentions may have been a touch calculated that day, but what the heck, I love her and I love to make her things.)

It’s been a long, long time since I have made honey cake, but I knew just the recipe I wanted to use and headed for my recipe box. There I found the batter-spattered card: “Never Fail Medivnyk (Ukrainian Honey Cake).” It’s a Mme Jehane Benoit recipe, originally published in 1970 in The Canadiana Cookbook: A Complete Heritage of Canadian Cooking. The recipe appeared in the Saskatchewan section of the cookbook and actually called for Saskatchewan or Manitoba honey. Luckily, my neighbour is an apiarist so I had real Manitoba honey in my pantry.

Since this was for my mom, I wanted to make a few small cakes that would better suit her needs than one large loaf, bundt or tube cake. I have a Nordic Ware® Multi-Mini Bundt pan that makes six cute, little sculpted bundt cakes. I only tried the pan once and then put it on the shelf. My recollection is that whatever I had baked in it, stuck in the pan and/or the pan was tough to clean. But I could picture how sweet the cake would look made in these pretty shapes and persevered – generously coating every nook and cranny of the pan with butter. (The recipe actually made enough batter to fill the fancy pan plus two four-inch springform pans.) The buttering up paid off. Five of the six cakes turned out great and the sixth only had a few points missing. I’m already thinking about what little cakes I’ll bake next in my mini bundt pan. (Incidentally, if you want to helpful information about cake pan sizes, check out the Joy of Baking.)

For the medivnyk taste test, I fearlessly asked two genuine Ukrainians - our good friends Barb and Larry. They gave the honey cake a thumbs up, and Barb said it reminded her of the honey cakes her mom used to make. Mme Benoit and I are honoured.

I’ve rewritten the original recipe very slightly here to make it a little easier to follow, and I included a Lemon Honey Glaze recipe just in case you’re feeling fancy.

Now get yourself some honey and take some time to create and enjoy this homemade treat. Mme Benoit wrote, “It would keep well one month, well wrapped in transparent paper. Keep it in a cool place. It improves with age.” That’s good to know, but I am sure these little cakes won’t be around that long.

MA's Medivnyk

Ready to make a honey cake

Adding the cooled honey

Preheat oven to 325º F.

1 cup honey

3 cups flour

1 tsp soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp salt

½ cup strong coffee, cooled

1 tsp vanilla

grated rind and juice of one orange

2 tbsp butter

1 cup sugar

4 eggs, separated

Generously coat pan(s) with butter or solid shortening. This is especially important if you are using a shaped cake pan. This makes one 12-cup Bundt or tube cake, one large loaf cake, or six to eight smaller cakes.

Bring the honey to a boil and then cool it.

Sift the flour with the soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt. Do this twice.

Combine coffee with vanilla and the grated rind and juice of the orange.

In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar.

Beginning to fold in egg whites

Add the cooled honey to butter and sugar.

Beat the egg yolks and add to honey/butter mixture.

Alternate adding the dry ingredients and coffee mixture to the egg yolk/honey/butter mixture.

Beat egg whites until stiff and then fold them into the batter.

Pour the batter into prepared pan(s).

Cool on rack

Bake about 45 minutes for loaf pan or single tube pan; about 25 minutes for mini-cake pans. Use cake tester or skewer to test for doneness.

Cool upright in pan for 10 minutes. Unmold and cool on cake rack.

Drizzle with Lemon Honey Glaze, if desired.

Printable Recipe for MA's Medivnyk

MA’s Lemon Honey Glaze

½ cup icing sugar

Ready for the taste test

2 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp honey

Mix all ingredients together, pressing out any little lumps of icing sugar.

Drizzle over cakes, quick breads or muffins for some sweet citrus tang.

Printable Recipe for MA's Lemon Honey Glaze

Banana Love: Blender Banana Layer Cake with Mocha Butter Icing

Two dense, moist layers with a more-chocolate-than-coffee butter icing

Banana. Even saying it brings comfort. BA NA NA

And no wonder. For most of us it's one of the first foods our moms mashed up and spoon-fed us. It appears on the original fast food list. It smells wonderful when baked into muffins, breads and cakes. It's best friends with chocolate, plays well with cream cheese and peanut butter, and you can't make a banana split without it.

The banana has just one little shortcoming. It can go from beautiful bright yellow to spotty brown to mushy black in a few short days. Or is this only a problem in my fruit bowl?

Luckily, there are a myriad of ways to use those less than yellow bananas. For this recipe, be sure to choose bananas that are ripe. A few brown spots are okay, but if your bananas are too mushy, they won't work as well here. Fear not, more banana recipes will follow to use up these unfortunates.

I found this recipe in an old cookbook by one of my favourite chefs, Madame Jehane Benoit. Mme Benoit was an icon in Canadian cooking for many years. In the cookbook, Madame Benoit Cooks at Home, she shares some recipes from her daughter Monique including one for Blender Banana Cake. This is my version of it. If you don't care for the Mocha Butter Icing, cream cheese frosting is equally delicious.

Oh, yeah, you'll need a blender to make this.

Blender Banana Layer Cake 

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Butter two 9” round layer cake pans.

2 ½ cups flour

1 ¼ tsp baking powder

1 ¼ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

3 ripe bananas (about 1 ½ cups), sliced

3 large eggs

2/3 cup butter, softened

2/3 cup buttermilk or soured milk*

1 2/3 cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

Put flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt into a mixing bowl.

Put all the remaining ingredients into the blender. Cover and blend until smooth.

Pour blender mixture over dry ingredients and stir until well mixed.

Fill each pan about half full.

Divide batter into cake pans.

Bake 30 to 35 minutes.

Cool pans on a wire rack.

Test each cake for doneness. Your tester will come out clean when cake is done. 

When cool, assemble and frost. The frosted cake will keep well in the refrigerator for several days. You can also freeze the unfrosted cakes to frost later.

* Soured milk is what to make when you don’t have buttermilk for a recipe. Basically, you take regular milk and add vinegar to it to make it curdle. In this recipe, I used slightly less than 2/3 cup of 1% milk and added about 2 tablespoons of vinegar to it. Voila, soured milk.


Printable Recipe for MA's Blender Banana Cake

Mocha Butter Icing

Icing ingredients with icing sugar divided into two quantities. Yes, that's a sifter in the lower right-hand corner. Sifting is an old-school technique that's worth it when you want a creamy, smooth icing.

½ cup butter, softened

3 cups sifted icing sugar, divided into 2 cups and 1 cup

1/3 cup sifted cocoa

2 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp cream or milk

2 tbsp brewed coffee, the stronger the better

MA’s Tip: Sifting the icing sugar and the cocoa is recommended for a smooth and creamy icing. You can mix this whole recipe up in a Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer if you are lucky enough to have one, but a hand mixer will work well, too.

Mix together cream/milk and brewed coffee and set aside.

Cream butter with 2 cups of icing sugar and cocoa.

Add vanilla and 1 cup of icing sugar to creamed mixture.

Gradually add cream/milk and coffee mixture until icing is smooth and has reached spreading consistency.

This recipe makes enough icing to fill and frost a two-layer cake or a 13” x 9” sheet cake.

Printable Recipe for MA's Mocha Butter Icing

Care to share a bite?