TNT Red Velvet Cupcake Recipe, Preferably Mrs. Beasley's LOL

J

jan_in_evansville

Enthusiast Member
My daughter-in-law is looking for a world class red velvet cupcake recipe. And after the Paris Hilton brouhaha about Mrs. Beasley's cupcakes, I would love some kind of Mrs. Beasley's clone for ANY kind of her cupcakes.

I'm a midwesterner, never been to Mrs. Beasleys, are they really that awesome? What makes them so special?

I've also been reading about Sprinkles Cupcakes, message boards seem to like them better than Mrs. Beasleys even, only luck I've had finding them is in a mix at Williams Sonoma. $14.00 for 12 cupcakes, pricey....

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer, you guys always give me great info!

 
Jan, while I love RVC, I can't get past the addition of so much red dye. BUT....

I've linked you to an entire group of bakers who take on the same challenge--each bake their own version then write about it.

I believe Meryl is the one who turned me on to this site.

They are called the Daring Bakers and alpineberry has hyperlinks to all of them on the lower right side. You can toggle through them and see their RVC results and their comments.

Might find a winner in the bunch.

In my opinion, anything swathed in sweet creamcheese is a winner already.

PS: Doing a google search with "daring Bakers" AND "red velvet cake" should find all of their recipes.
(Well, in my mind, those search parameters should find them, but boolean logic and my brain are not playing nicely these days.)

http://alpineberry.blogspot.com/search?q=red+velvet

 
I've used the REC from the chockylit blog, and made them in a sweetheart rose pan...

This recipe worked out really well. I liked that she upped the yield from a standard recipe to make 36 cupcakes. I actually only got 24 roses, plus a little bit more.

And they were absolutely gorgeous in my sweetheart rose pan smileys/smile.gif Since the design is on the top of the cupcakes, I put the frosting into a pastry bag with a plain tip, then stuck the tip into the bottom of each cake, and squoze (squeezed?) the frosting into the middle of the cake, like a Hostess cupcake.

It woulda tasted better with more frosting, but I loved the look of it, so I'd do it that way again. Plus, people were pleasantly surprised to find the frosting in the middle smileys/smile.gif

http://chockylit.blogspot.com/2005/10/red-velvet-cupcakes-with-vanilla-bean.html

http://www.nordicware.com/images/product/thumbs/56737.jpg

 
Eating Red Dye...

That so turns me off too. I noticed that a lot of recipes have toned it down to a couple spoons full from the entire bottle they used to specify.

The original RVC didn't have any chemical dyes in it (since they didn't exist like that in early 20th C. I have an old recipe that uses cooked beets, which was a common coloring in earlier times. Also, the cocoa turns red naturally from the acids in the recipe, and the cocoa used back then had an even bigger color change than present day dutch process cocoa. I read this somewhere, no idea about the differences in modern and earlier times coca, but it sounded believable.

 
I have to assume that the red dye has no flavor or appreciable texture component, so...

...why not just leave it out and call it Brownish-Beige Velvet Cake?

Not a lot of sizzle there, I guess.

Michael

 
Thanks, Richard, been looking for this info. I did remember that in the "old days" we didn't use...

coloring but somehow got a deep reddish brown color in some devil food cake recipes.

 
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