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Orders out the wazoo! 3 this week! Things are starting to move :D
The first was for 6 for a friend's, friend's birthday. Chocolate with orange cream cheese and chocolate cherry filled with Godiva white chocolate liqueur buttercream; apparently a delicious success.
The second was for 2 dozen miniatures for a wonderful lady. She lives in the same building as the restaurant I work in and it was her birthday today. I sort of half worked her party in the wine bar (I bartend), but was sent home early since the other bartender was also working incase things got crazy. After being sweetly invited to join them for a drink, I sat down and enjoyed a beer.
Her order included chocolate with strawberry buttercream, all natural red velvet with cream cheese icing, coconut with lime buttercream and lemon with blueberry cream cheese icing. I had a lot of fun with this order!
Now the third is for Saturday, which I believe is for a first anniversary. My services were enlisted after a local bakery that just opened up disappointed her by some expensive, not-so-special cupcakes for her last party. I'm going to do my best to wow her with some fancy little concoctions for a much cheaper price.
I'm LOVING the direction things are going in! I also have another order for a wedding shower in August, including cookies, a cheesecake and maybe a pie. YUMMY!
Best. Job. Ever.
After much trial and tribulation, I've finally discovered the secret to an all natural red velvet! With so many people having allergies to the dyes in food colouring nowadays, I wanted to create the classic favorite that everyone could enjoy!
I'd tried using muddled raspberries and pomegranate juice and it barely gave the cake any colour, if any at all. After reading about beets being used in the batter, I was still skeptical since every picture I saw of the end result was more of a reddish-brown than a nice, bright red. Plus the colour in beets can easily be altered with any pH change in the batter, so that too made me a little leary.
There were dozens of different methods for using beets; grate them and mix them in, use beet juice, boil the beets and use the water...but I wasn't happy with the results of any of them. Finally I tried boiling about 4 medium sized beets for almost an hour. After that I reduced the water until there was approximately 4oz left; what was left over was a concentrated natural dye that was as dark, if not darker, than any red food colouring I've ever seen. After letting it cool, I mixed it into the batter and success! I was left with the gorgeous red colour I had been after.
The only thing I was surprised at was after baking, the inside of the cupcakes reverted back to the light brown colour of the batter before I added the colouring. The outside, however, stayed that nice red. I still have a little tweaking to do, but overall I'm very pleased with how they turned out!
This was my first attempt at making red velvet (and also my first experience eating it!). It seemed to be so popular I figured I should finally try it myself and see what all the fuss was about.
Although it was quite tasty, I really don't think it lived up to the hype. To me it just tasted like a barely-chocolate-chocolate cake, plus all the red food coloring kind of put me off. I think next time I'm going to use the juice from muddled raspberries for colour (and flavor obviously!). I mean, how delicious is raspberry and chocolate together? Plus this way they're made with nothing artificial, which is what I want the core of TC to be.
Regardless, the cake was really moist and still had a lot of flavor. I topped off the little cakes with cinnamon cream cheese icing.
Thanks to Bakerella for the recipe!
