Red Velvet, A Cake With Humble American Origins, Will Star At This Week's Royal Wedding

Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank will serve red velvet cake at their wedding.  (Jonathan Brady/Pool File Photo via AP)

For generations, American bakers  have been making red velvet cakes, often as a substitute for costlier chocolate. Now, red velvet is going to star at a royal wedding.

Britain's Princess Eugenie announced this weekend that she has chosen red velvet cake, with chocolate frosting, for her wedding to liquor entrepreneur Jack Brooksbank.

The pair will marry on Friday at St. George's Chapel, on the grounds of Windsor Castle. Following in the path of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, aka Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the pair will have a royal carriage ride around Windsor.

Then, they'll go inside for a lunch whose star attraction will be a cake made by a London-based cake designer.

In Harry and Meghan's cake, that was a lemon-elderflower cake made by American baker Claire Ptak, owner of Violet Cakes. This time, Sophie Cabot gets to be the star.

According to the Royal Family Twitter account, she was introduced to the couple by the bride's father, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. Cabot was discovered through the prince's entrepreneurial program, Pitch@Palace.

The cake is "inspired by the rich colors of autumn." But it's actually American in origin, and for much of its history, has been considered a comfort food, rather than a dessert for royalty.

In case you've never tried it, red velvet cake features a reddish appearance. The cake itself is not chocolate, although recipes often use cocoa powder and it has a faint hint of chocolate flavor. Many versions have buttermilk and vinegar, which cut the sweetness.

Once baked, the cake is slathered with either cream cheese frosting, like the kind used on carrot cake, or a cooked frosting that's known as seven-minute icing.

The Adams Extract Company in Gonzales,Texas claims to have made the first official "red velvet" cake during the 1920s. The cake featured Adams' red food coloring, part of a four-color pack that the company still sells today.

Because of the cake's Texas roots, the flavor spread first across the South. The "velvet" part of the name comes from the use of cocoa, which helped to smooth out the texture of the cake, but chocolate was never a predominant note.

And, when cocoa became less available during World War II rationing, some bakers substituted beet juice in order to make the cake richer and deeper in color. The beets also made the cakes moist, according to writer Gwen Watson.

Red velvet cake appears in the 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking, by Erma Rombauer, giving the cake its first national publicity. According to Watson, Rombauer was not a fan, who dubbed it "generally popular," hardly a ringing endorsement.

In the more-prosperous 1950s, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York put the item on its menu, erroneously claiming to have invented the cake.

Red velvet generally bumped along as a regional flavor until the cupcake craze took over New York around 2000. Since fashionable cupcakes are mainly a delivery vehicle for mounds of frosting, red velvet seemed like a perfect, unobtrusive base.

Stella Parks' red velvet cake.Micheline Maynard

This summer, I took a baking class with Stella Parks, author of the well-regarded cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts. Parks meticulously researched her recipes, getting behind the myths surrounding them, such as Toll House Cookies and yellow cakes.

On an episode of public radio's The Splendid Table, Parks told host Francis Lam that the redness of red velvet cake really took off in the 1940s.

"There was a recipe from the 1940s that had four ounces of red food coloring in there – which is insane," Parks said. "That’s a quarter of a cup of petrochemicals, which is scary and intense. But it made an outrageously colored cake. From there, red velvet took off because that's a very eye-catching thing."

We found out in class that Parks' secret is to add red wine to her cake. Non-imbibers can skip this step, but it made her cake especially rich and gives it an even darker appearance than many red velvet cakes.

Parks also told us to make the frosting first, which is not a bad idea in case you decide to use up the rest of the wine on hand.

It's not clear how red velvet leapt across the Atlantic to become popular in Britain. But red velvet cake, and cake roll has been featured on several episodes of The Great British Bake Off.

And as American bakery products have become more popular in fashionable London bakeries, such as the one owned by  Ptak, it may have been only a matter of time before it appeared on a royal menu.

According to a press release from Buckingham Palace, Cabot is a originally a costume designer, "with a particular love for making sugar-flowers and using her hand-painting skills" in her cakes.

“I am incredibly excited to be given this wonderful opportunity to create such a special and unique cake," the baker said.

So, scoot over, lemon-elderflower. Make room for an American classic, red velvet.

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Read Again https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelinemaynard/2018/10/07/red-velvet-a-cake-with-humble-american-origins-will-star-at-this-weeks-royal-wedding/

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