Red Velvet Cake

When you come across a great recipe, it's a good practice to give credit where credit is due.

This Red Velvet cake recipe is out of the book, Stories and Recipes from Mia Famiglia: Cake Boss written by Buddy Valastro from the TLC TV series.  It's wonderful and very moist.

Makes two 9-inch cakes or 24 cupcakes

1 1/4 cups vegetable shortening
2 cups granulated sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
4 1/2 teaspoons (2 tubes) red food-coloring gel
3 cups cake flour, plus more for dusting pans
1 1/4 teaspoons fine sea salt
1 1/4 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/4 teaspoons distilled white vinegar
3 extra-large eggs
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
Unsalted butter, for greasing 2 cake pans (about 2 tablespoons); non-stick cooking spray or vegetable oil may be substituted

1. Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Put the shortening, sugar, cocoa powder, food coloring, cake flour, salt, vanilla, baking soda, and vinegar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.  Paddle, starting at low speed, then raise the speed to low-medium and mix about 1 minute. Add the eggs, 1 at  time, mixing for 1 minute after each is absorbed into the mixture. Add the buttermilk in two stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl between additions.
3. Grease two-9-inch pans with the butter, and flour them.
4. Divide the batter evenly between the two cake pans, using rubber spatula to scrape down the bowl and get as much obattar as possible out.
5. Bake until the cake begins to pull from the side of the pan and is springy to the touch, 35 - 40 minutes.
6. Remove from the oven and let cool for at least 30 minutes, preferably an hour. The cake should be at room temp. before you remove it from the pan. Put a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet, top with sugar, dump onto parchment; the sugar will keep it from sticking. Refrigerate or freeze until ready to decorate.



Life

In my mind I've written about 10 blog posts over the course of the last 4 weeks, but haven't found the time to actually sit down and do anything about it.  Does that ever happen to you?  That running list in your mind goes on and on and when you have a few minutes to do what you feel you really need to do, you stop and whoosh...it's gone.  Just gone from your mind.

I feel as if it's happening to me more and more.

So, here's the highlights from the last few weeks:

• Honey Girl scheduled her C-Section. Granddaughter will arrive March 29th. (this one trumps everything else)
• Had classes on bread, pastry dough and custards.  No major failures
• Have participated in 2 Brunches at school; 1 more to go (for this semester)
• Baked and shipped decorated heart shaped sugar cookies all over the country to squeals of delight and surprise, which is really cool and fun
• Lost my mind in class and called the Chef Instructor "Dude"
• Learned not to the call the Chef Instructor "Dude," no matter what he is doing to my pastry
• Tested and found a Red Velvet cake recipe that rocks
• Successfully made Italian Meringue at home
• Rode over 200 miles in 3 days on my trainer and am ever so grateful to Mr. Man for Netflix
• Have come to the realization that my dreaming about baking means I need to really do something with this passion
• Have to figure out how to not freak out about following my passion

Some days it's overwhelming, some days is manageable.  No one pushes me harder than I push myself and no one ever will.

There's a lot going on but isn't that what life is about?  Learning, growing, risking, evolving and becoming the very best version of you that you can be?