Happened to bake this last week for a little Red Riding Hood on her b'day. The process was quite elaborate and time consuming and the trouble I faced with the whipping cream, made it even more tiresome . But at the end of day, the radiance on the little face made up for all that and more. Those tiny eyes glowed brighter than the b'day candles. And the sponge was the best ever I had had. So, I might bake more of those.
This is quite a huge cake and if you want a smaller one, try with half the ingredients. You don't even need to do the frosting, the sponge tastes as velvety and decadent or better without any dressing. If you badly fancy , just dust some icing sugar at the edges and you will be good to go.
Ingredients:
All purpose flour - 2.5 cups
cocoa powder - 6 tsp
baking soda - 1 tsp
salt - 1 tsp
baking powder - 1/2 tsp
sugar - 1.5 cups
buttermilk - 1 cup
Oil - 1 cup
Vinegar - 1 tsp
eggs - 2
butter - 1/2 cup
edible red liquid/gel colour -3 tsp/3 drops
vanilla essence - 2 tsp
(All the ingredients at room temperature)
Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt . You may sift it once or more times to bring them well together. I always sift these dry ingredients twice.
Mix them well with a spatula and keep aside.
In another bowl, beat butter and sugar till they are smooth and the butter turns paler.
Next, add the eggs. Add them one at a time. Beat and combine well and only then add the next.
Add vinegar, oil, buttermilk one by one, waiting for each ingredient to combine well before adding the next.
In case you do not have buttermilk, you can turn milk into buttermilk. Take milk, add 3 teaspoons of white vinegar, mix and set it aside for 10 minutes. You may do it just before you start with the sifting and mixing and it will be ready by the time it has to go into the recipe.
Add vanilla.
Once all the wet ingredients are combined well, start adding the dry ingredients gradually, combining them well.
Add the food colour. Try and use gel colour or liquid colour. Powder colour will not give you good results. You might need 2-4 spoons depending on the quality and shade of the colour you are using. I had to use 3.5 spoons of liquid colour for the shade I wanted.If you are using gel colour you would need only around 3 drops. The powder colour I once used was a poor choice. I had to add lots of it for the right shade and at the end, the recipe kind of tasted of the colour, the salty flavour that the powder colour gives out.. So I stopped using them after that.
Get your baking dish ready. Grease and dust it with flour or line with a parchment paper .
Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin.tap well and pop it into your preheated oven and bake at 170 degrees for 20 minutes.
Depending on the size of your tray, bake the cake in one batch or 2 batches.
I had to bake in 2 batches in a preheated convection microwave at 170 degrees for 20 minutes.
Use a skewer to check at 18 minutes.If it isn't ready continue baking for another 2 minutes.
It's absolutely normal for it to crack on top and have a brown crust instead of red. The crack indicates how perfectly it is baked and the crust will be trimmed before you serve or do the frosting.
Allow the cake to cool for a while before you take it out of the tin. Place it on a wire rack till it comes down to room temperature.
You may serve it plain or dress it up using a regular cream frosting, buttercream frosting or a cream cheese frosting. Play around and enjoy the creativity.
I left it overnight in the fridge and did the frosting the next day. I divided the cake into 2 layers each.So, I had 4 layers in all. Frosted with 3 layers and served the fourth layer plain.
If you are comfortable to bake and frost the cake on the same day, make sure you freeze it for at least 30 minutes once the cake comes down to room temperature and then start with the decoration.
For regular frosting:
Take around 2 cups of heavy dairy free whipping cream , beat it till it forms fine stiff peaks. Cut the cake into the number of layers you prefer. Brush with simple syrup and apply the frosting over it. Brush sugar syrup before spreading the whipping cream on each layer. Make sure you have a good quality whipping cream or it won't form stiff peaks and you won't be able to use it for layering and frosting. You can neither use Amul cream(the blue carton) or Amul whipping cream(red carton) for frosting a cake. You can see the how bad it can turn. I wasn't aware that the said whipping cream won't work and I hopelessly struggled saving the recipe. All I could do was make a 3 with some sprinklers to make it presentable.
Always use cream that is preferably at zero degrees to whip. Also leave your bowl and blades in the freezer for 30 minutes before you start whipping the cream, the right whipping cream, that is. If you haven't any, even these hacks won't help you. You may make some buttercream frosting, instead.
For cream cheese frosting:
Whip 1.5 cups of whipping cream to form stiff peaks. Fold it into the cream cheese(2.2 cups) after beating it with powdered sugar(1.5 cups) and vanilla(1 tsp) till creamy and smooth.
Trim the crust and edges of the cake before frosting. Crumble and use the trimmed edges for coating the sides or sprinkle all over the edges.
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