Any baking enthusiast will love to try Mary Berry’s impressive and gorgeous red velvet cake.
On the outside, there’s lovely buttercream icing and chocolate truffles, but once somebody slices into the cake, an exuberant red reveals itself.
As with any Mary Berry bake, the red velvet cake is destined to be moist, tasty and moreish.
Taking a bit of time to prepare, this is the ideal treat to make when you have a little bit of time on your hands.
Here’s how to recreate Mary Berry’s delicious red velvet cake with her top-notch recipe.
Red velvet cake
- Serves: eight people
- Prep: 30 mins to 1 hour
- Bakes in: 10 to 30 mins
Ingredients
For the red velvet cake
- Butter, for greasing
- 250g plain flour
- One tbsp cocoa powder
- Two tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 250g light muscovado sugar
- 200ml pint buttermilk
- 150ml pint sunflower oil
- Two tsp vanilla extract
- One tbsp red food colouring gel
- Two large eggs
- Eight white chocolate truffle balls, to decorate
For the buttercream icing
- 250g butter, softened
- Two tsp vanilla extract
- 300g icing sugar
- 250g full-fat mascarpone
Method
Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan/gas four). Grease two 20cm sandwich tins and line the bases with baking paper. Measure the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and sugar into a bowl and mix well.
Mix the buttermilk, oil, vanilla, food colouring and 100ml of water in a jug. Add the eggs and whisk until smooth. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk until combined (the mixture should be bright red).
Divide the mixture evenly between the two prepared tins and level the surfaces. Bake for about 25 to 30 minutes. Cool in the tins for 10 minutes, then turn out, peel off the paper and leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
To make the buttercream icing
Place the soft butter and vanilla extract in a large bowl and sift in half the icing sugar. Mix with an electric whisk until smooth. Sift in the remaining icing sugar and mix again. Add the mascarpone to the bowl and gently stir with a spatula.
Put a fluted nozzle in a piping bag and spoon about 150g of the buttercream into the bag.
To assemble the cake
Sit one of the sponges on a cake plate and spread one-third of the buttercream over the cake, then sit the other cake on top. Ice the cake by first spreading a thin layer of icing over the whole cake before chilling for 30 minutes.
Pile the remaining icing from the bowl on top and spread it with a palette knife over the top and around the edges to completely cover the cake (make sure that the icing is smooth around the edges before starting to create lines up the sides). Make wide lines up the sides and swirl the top.
Use the reserved buttercream in the piping bag to pipe a rope design around the edge of the top of the cake. To do this, start at the edge of the cake and pipe continuous swirls of icing overlapping each swirl as you pipe around the edge of the cake. Decorate with the chocolate truffles to finish.
