Red Velvet Candy Cane Cake

Happy Christmas everyone! I thought I’d get you all in the spirit by leaving you with the festive twist on my Red Velvet with Mascarpone Frosting Cake. The inspiration for this cake design was taken from Raspberri Cupcakes Candy Cane Cake, you can check out her amazing blog here.

Sponge Ingredients:

30ml blackberry juice

30ml beetroot juice

Red gel food colouring (1-2tbsp)

110g butter

330g self raising flour

230ml buttermilk

1tsp vanilla essence

50g cocoa powder 

1tsp salt

2 eggs

300g granulated sugar 

2tsp white wine vinegar 

Frosting Ingredients:

150g mascarpone

300ml double cream

65g sugar

Lots and lots of candy canes!

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Cream sugar and butter together in a large bowl, once combined add the eggs in one at a time.

Gently fold in your beetroot, blackberry juice and vanilla essence – you’ll have a rather wet mixture at this point, but don’t worry.

Add in your cocoa powder, ensuring this is sieved and there are no lumps (a lump of cocoa powder doesn’t taste too great when biting into a cake, believe it or not). Add the salt.

Sieve the flour, and add into the mixture alternating with the buttermilk.

Now it’s time to add the food colouring, start off slowly and build up your colour here to your desired shade. This will deepen a little in the oven, so don’t worry. Dependant on how much colouring you’ve added, if needs be you can add just a little extra flour to ensure the mix isn’t too overly runny.

Once all ingredients are combined, finish off by mixing in your white wine vinegar.

Split the mixture between two cake tins, and bake for approximately 25 – 30 minutes. Once baked, wait for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack and leaving to cool completely.

Wait until the cake is cooled, and combine the ingredients for your frosting. No fancy techniques here, I literally threw everything into a bowl and whizzed it up until it was nice and firm with an electric whisk.

Sandwich the sponge layers together, with a nice helping of the mascarpone frosting in the middle. Don’t worry if some pushes over the edges – you’ll be covering the whole thing anyway. As this cake is very moist, having two larger layers will be absolutely fine, however you can change this to four thiner layers if you wish.

It’s up to you, but I’d recommend applying a very very thin layer of the frosting to the cake at first, to crumb coat it; leave this to set for 20 minutes in the fridge, then just enjoy covering and decorating your cake.

For mine, I added crushed candy canes around the edges, then just went wild randomly planting these wonderful curly candy canes anywhere I could get them.

This cake must be kept in the fridge, and is best served cold.