Red Velvet Birthday Cake with Cream Cheese Icing

Cook's Country's Red Velvet Cake

This was a fun and festive treat I made for my family on Valentine’s Day. 

I am still trying to figure out how I feel about Red Velvet Cake as a concept. (Is it chocolate? No? Why is there cocoa powder in it? Why is it so red? So many questions. ) However, I do have to love anything whose primary purpose appears to be to serve as a vehicle for delivering Cream Cheese Frosting to my belly.

Cook’s Country was kind enough to post the cake recipe on their site. I originally discovered found this recipe in The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book (ATK is Cook’s Country’s mothership, if you will) and actually made it once before, almost 4 years ago. However, I was not a fan of the book’s Cream Cheese Frosting, which is thin and soupy, and quite impossible to work with (I remember this particularly well because I scrawled “NO” all over the recipe).  

This time, I used the icing recipe from the Cook’s Country site, which is quite different from the one in the book. The new recipe is perfection itself, unless you’re on a diet.  It’s easy to work with, but has much more butter and double the cream cheese of my regular go-to recipe from Philadelphia Cream Cheese. Oh, and it’s really, really tasty. We licked the bowl and beaters clean.

A simple heart for Valentine's Day

red velvet package cake

This is the cake I decorated today in my Wilton Course 3 class. It's far and away my favorite of those that I've done so far. Underneath all that fondant is a Red Velvet Layer Cake (from The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book) topped with Philadelphia Cream Cheese Frosting.