Red Velvet is a very fashionable cake choice at the moment for celebrations. I don’t particularly fancy red velvet but it’s so tasty I make this very often for birthdays. I didn’t realise how tasty it was until I had a red velvet cake at a birthday party. This version is seriously good. It’s so good with ermine cream cheese icing, I’m considering this as a potential business plan.

The difficulty I have is that my cakes look ugly. I don’t mean that the edges are soft, the cakes are not level, they dome – which I expect because it is home made. I mean they look like the icon from michelin tires. I use both aluminum and silicon pans. The silicon is slightly less misshaped but that means I have to slice off about an inch all around. After lopping off the dome, I have about one inch height of usable cake left. The aluminum pan makes cakes that look like the Michelin tire mascot.

The second difficulty is that cakes cannot look nice in the heat. This time-lapse video of various frosting at 32 degrees heat  is rather convincing that ermine frosting holds up for at least 30 mins.

For little boy’s birthday, I am planning to make a red velvet cake with ermine cream cheese frosting. I would need to bake it, freeze, thaw it out, frost and freeze it to get a good firm smoothness for the icing. Tricky business, cake decorating.