| Total: | 1 hr 30 min |
| Prep: | 20 min |
| Cook: | 1 hr 10 min |
Ingredients
- 1 cup vegetable shortening
- 2 eggs
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 1 teaspoon cocoa powder
- 2 ounces red food coloring
- 2 1/2 cups cake flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup buttermilk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon vinegar
- White frosting, recipe follows
- 2 tablespoons flour
- 1 cup milk
- 1 cup unsalted butter
- 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- In the bowl of a mixer, cream together the shortening, eggs and sugar. In a separate small bowl, mix together the cocoa and food coloring. Add the paste to the shortening mixture. Sift the flour and salt together over parchment. Add to the batter alternately with the buttermilk in 3 additions. Add the vanilla extract. Fold in the baking soda and vinegar. Pour the batter into 2 greased 9-inch cake pans. Bake for 30 minutes or until an inserted cake tester comes out clean. Let cool on a cooling rack. Invert the cakes from the pans.
- Frosting: Over medium heat, cook the flour and milk until thickened. Let cool. In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy. Beat in the flour mixture.
- Frost the top of the first layer with frosting and set the second layer on top. Frost the entire cake with remaining frosting.
Reviews
This is the red flannel cake recipe from my mid-western childhood. The trick with the icing is to make sure that the cooked flour mixture needs to be absolutely cool/cold before mixing in everything else. When done this way, the icing turns out to be a wonderful vanilla-full icing that melts in your mouth.
I only made the frosting and, after reading the other reviews, my result was the same as many others. I made the first batch according to the directions. It was a gross, gloppy MESS! So then I watched the video and noticed the ingredients she quoted as using were not the same as the ones listed in the written recipe. So I tried it again with the new ingredients. Same result. Huge, floppy mess!! It looked like runny cottage cheese, just not that inviting. I reached out to food.com and was eventually told the recipe was correct and to read the reviews. So I did and found out I am not alone in my problem with the icing. I threw the recipe away. I’m now very leery of using food.com for recipes for fear of getting incorrect or bad recipes. I may delete them from my apps.
Cake was fairly good, but definitely there are issues with the recipe for the frosting. Discrepancies between what Gale says in video and what is in printed recipe and lack of necessary instructions created a lot of frustration. Other users gave helpful advice but still came out poorly. You can tell the frosting would be good if all the pieces to the puzzle were included.
Horrible recipe! I’m so disappointed in this cake, total waste of time and food network should consider removing it from their website. There was zero flavor to the cake.
Beets in a cake? That sounds disgusting but I’d be willing to eat a cake made with beets. I’m sure all the red velvet cakes that I’ve eaten over the years were all made with food coloring and some of them were absolutely delicious and some were horrible. I wish people wouldn’t assume that just because this or other red velvet recipes don’t use beet juice that they aren’t good. Who knows. Maybe the ones with food coloring taste better than the ones with beet juice or perhaps it’s the other way around. The only way to know is to try several of both since the taste varies depending on how they are made (not referring to the source of the red color). In other words, don’t knock it until you tried it.
The cake is dry and tasteless.
ANY Cake that PROCLAIMS to be a Red Velvet Cake and consists of red food coloring is not a Red Velvet Cake. A TRUE Red Velvet Cake is made from beet juice, before that, the “red coloring” was caused by a chemical reaction between the buttermilk and the cocoa. This is ONE of my biggest pet peeves, when it comes to Red Velvet Cake made from red food coloring.
It’s Red Velvet Cake – perfection!
Not a great recipe, it uses hydrogenated vegetable shortening.
the best