Best Ever Red Velvet Cake; simply the best recipe for the most moist and fluffy ruby red light chocolate cake with sweet cream cheese icing!

Ok everyone, I love this cake so much I want to shout about it.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to shout, I’m just going to type instead.

This beautiful cake has had many lives, many forms and many taste-tests but I finally feel ready to say that this red velvet cake is perfect.

So many red velvet recipes that I’ve tried, from cake shops, books, the internet and the crevices of my own scattered mind, have been disappointing. Too dry, too dense, too sweet, too brown, you name it, I’ve tasted it in red velvet cake form. However, by removing some fiddly steps and getting the qualities of ingredients right (something I’m known to play with a lot!), this is genuinely the best ever red velvet cake. In my family’s opinion at least.

I learned recently that red velvet cake originated when the chemical compounds found in old-fashioned American cocoa powder reacted with cake raising agents, causing a rosy hue when baked. Interesting, eh? Nowadays it comes from wonderfully artificial food colouring paste, but who’s complaining? It’s a delicious classic either way!

(BTW, this is the BEST food colouring paste for your red velvet cake!)

This best ever red velvet cake is light, moist, fluffy, with just a hint of cocoa and vanilla, and is sandwiched and swirled with sweet and tangy cream cheese icing. Yeah, just get me a slice now pls. Oh, and it’s easy to make too!

To whip up this best ever red velvet cake, you’ll first need to preheat your oven and grease/line two sandwich cake tins.

Place some butter, sugar and vanilla into a large bowl and beat with a mixer or by hand until light and fluffy.

Add two eggs one at a time, beating between each addition until fully combined.

Add your food colouring until the mixture reaches a vivid ruby-red. Oooooh pretty…

Sift some flour, cocoa, raising agents and salt and mix together in a separate bowl.

Tip half of this into your butter-sugar-egg mixture and mix together.

Follow this with the buttermilk, followed by the rest of the flour mixture and the vinegar, and mix gently until fully combined into a gloriously thick red cake batter.

Scoop all the batter into the two prepared cake tins and smooth out the top as best you can.

Bake the cakes until firm and a skewer inserted into the centre can be pulled out cleanly. Allow the cakes to cool for at least 15 minutes before removing them from the tin to cool completely.

Meanwhile, make the addictively sweet and tangy cream cheese icing.

Beat together some butter, vanilla and icing sugar until combined.

Add some more icing sugar, cream cheese and lemon juice and beat vigorously until fully incorporated and pale in colour. It may be slightly too soft to use at this stage, if so, chilling it in the fridge for 30-40 minutes should bring it right!

Once the cake is completely cool and your icing is your preferred consistency, level off the top of the cake with a sharp knife so that it is nice and flat.

Use your fingers to mush the cake cuttings up into ruby-red velvet crumbs.

Spread the top of both sponges thickly with the cream cheese icing and place one atop the other, sprinkling the reserved crumbs around the edge of the top layer.

This recipe makes enough icing to coat the whole cake in it if you’d prefer to decorate it like that. I’m much more of a “cake person” than an “icing person” so I prefer two billowing clouds of icing between the thick layers of cake rather than it coating everything, but it’s completely up to you how you decorate it!

Now just slice it up and enjoy!

Scroll down for the full recipe to make the best ever red velvet cake.

Thanks as always for reading, hope to see you again soon!