It started one Saturday night at the bowling alley of Holiday Lane, where my team was competing against another to move up the place board. We were all having a good time as far as I could tell when it was announced about half way into the second game that it was someones birthday, I can't remember his name but he was a friendly old man on the opposing team. His other team mates brought out a small cake covered in white icing which was promptly cut up and shared amongst themselves. When they offered my team a some cake we happily excepted. When I got a better look at it I found that it was red velvet cake, and when I tasted it I found that it had a distinct coffee flavor that I had never tasted before in such a cake. Loving this flavor so I made the decision to try and duplicate it.
Having tasted coffee flavored red velvet cake I went to work looking up recipes. Initially I thought the color and flavor would be hard to duplicate, though once I found a recipe it was a simple matter of adding one to three table spoons of red food coloring to buttermilk cake batter. Finding the recipe was the easy part, the hard part was getting the ingredients. I wandered King Soopers for probably an hour before I found that they didn't carry cake flour. Down but not defeated, I went home and tried making the cake with regular all-purpose flour. The cake came out okay, it tasted fine if a little dense. The saving grace was probably the cream cheese icing considering how sweet it was. This was the first cake I ever baked.
My next attempt was for the Christmas family get together. This time I tried adding some instant coffee to the mix to better imitate the cake that inspired me to take up baking in the first place. Everyone said it tasted fine though the icing was too sweet and over powering and the coffee flavor didn't come through.
That was two years ago, and I'm still trying to get the deep red that a red velvet cake is supposed to have, I've since figured out how to make substitute cake flour using corn starch and all purpose flour, so hopefully this year at Christmas it will turn out right.
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