Red velvet cake (a leaner approach)

I've been fascinated by red velvet cake ever since I had a slice at an American exchange student's party a couple of years ago. Both the strange redness and the extreme sweetness make it an interesting, and also a very American, cake. Only an American would make a cake that screams 'look at me! I',m red!' as loudly as this one, and only an American could suffer the intense sweetness of all that sugar without wincing. However, I had completely forgotten about red velvet cakes until the Great British Bake-off started again, and someone made a red velvet Swiss role.
So I looked up several recipes, most of which on American websites, and I was completely bowled over by the amount of calories you are supposed to put in. There was one recipe that required about a kilo of butter, a kilo of icing sugar, and 8 eggs. These are really not normal amounts for cake making (in my book, at least).
So I went for a more British approach, and picked Lorraine's three tiered recipe, selecting the middle tier (23 cm) as the cake to make. The ingredients were still vastly beyond any limit, so I halved them. For the buttercream I did something completely different, because I refuse to put 600 g of icing sugar in with 300 g of butter, that makes the whole thing just too sweet, especially with fondant icing added on top. So I changed the ratios there a bit. Also, I used a recipe that requires food colouring instead of boiled beets, as I've had enough trouble with beet stains in my life.

Ingredients:
175 g butter
175 g sugar
3 eggs
150 g flour
25 g cocoa powder
baking powder
25 ml food colouring (red, obviously)
500 g rollable fondant icing (white)

buttercream:
100 g butter (softened)
60 g icing sugar
100 g cream cheese

Preheat your oven to 180 C.
Grease the tin and line the bottom with baking paper.
Beat the sugar and butter together until fluffy. Beat in the eggs one by one, then add the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and a pinch of salt. Add the food colouring (I did this little by little, because the whole thing turns an outraging shade of red which then dies down as you mix the thing). Put in the cake tin and bake for about 40-50 minutes (I forgot to change the baking time to the lesser amount of ingredients, so I ended up with a slightly burned and very dry cake).
When it's done take out of the oven and leave to cool completely.

Red batter

For the buttercream, mix together the butter and icing sugar until fluffy. Add the cream cheese and mix again.

When your cake is completely cool, cut in halve and sandwich the halves together again using the butter cream. Cover the entire outside with the remaining butter cream (this will go better if your cake is not dry, with little red crumbs sticking everywhere). If you have any indentations, use the butter cream to fill them for a more even end result.

Buttercream-covered crumbs

Spread some icing sugar over your work surface and roll out the fondant icing until it is very thin and large enough to cover the whole cake. Transfer onto the cake (this is surprisingly easy) and press down gently so that the icing sticks to the butter cream. You can decorate the cake using anything you want, but I thought this was enough of an exercise for one day.

Slightly burned brown-redness

So, the end result was pretty dry and a bit over cooked, but still quite edible. You can taste the cocoa coming through, and the butter cream was not too sweet. The fondant icing makes for a nice look, but it doesn't really add anything to the taste. All in all, halving the ingredients still made for a pretty decent cake, I can't imagine how rich it would have been with the full amount of ingredients. Still, a very nice cake to have made, and I foresee some red velvet cupcakes in my future, as I still have quite a lot of food colouring left over. And this is one of those 'I'll never be able to do that myself!' cakes that I can now cross of my list.