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Red vel­vet, while syn­ony­mous with Valen­tines Day and now pop­u­lar for wed­dings, is just plain gor­geous to look at.  To be totally hon­est, red is my absolute favourite colour and any chance I get to wear it, look at it or eat it I do.  Not that many red foods around when you think about it… and I don’t really eat very much red meat.

Sooo let’s get busy and make some deli­cious red vel­vet cook­ies to be enjoyed and shared all year around.  But wait, just think how cute they would be for Christ­mas or Valentine’s Day as well!

This recipe calls for Dutch Processed Choco­late.   So what’s the dif­fer­ence between that and reg­u­lar unsweet­ened cocoa pow­der you ask?   First off, Both types of cocoa pow­der are unsweet­ened and there­fore bit­ter when tasted alone.

Ok, on to our recipe:

Ingre­di­ents:

3 1/4 cups (355 grams) all pur­pose flour
1/4 cup (75 grams) unsweet­ened Dutch processed cocoa pow­der
1/2 tea­spoon salt
1 tea­spoon (4 grams) bak­ing pow­der
1 cup (227 grams) unsalted but­ter, room tem­per­a­ture
1 3/4 cups (350 grams) gran­u­lated white sugar
2 large eggs
2 tea­spoons pure vanilla extract
3 Table­spoons of Red Food Col­or­ing.. I used the gel type

For Red Vel­vet Cookies:

1. In a large bowl whisk together the flour, cocoa pow­der, salt, and bak­ing powder.

2. In the bowl of your elec­tric mixer (or with a hand mixer), beat the but­ter and sugar until light and fluffy (about 3 to 4 min­utes). Add the eggs, one at a time, beat­ing well after each addi­tion. Add the vanilla extract and the food col­or­ing then beat until combined.

Add the flour mix­ture and beat until you have a smooth dough.

3. Divide the dough in half and wrap each half in plas­tic wrap. Refrig­er­ate for about one hour or until firm enough toroll.

4. Pre­heat oven to 350 degrees F (177 degrees C) and place rack in the cen­ter of the oven. Line two bak­ing sheets with parch­ment paper.

5.    Remove one half of the chilled dough from the refrig­er­a­tor and, on a lightly floured sur­face, roll out the dough to a thick­ness of 1/4 inch (1 cm). (Keep turn­ing the dough as you roll, mak­ing sure the dough does not stick to the counter.) Cut out desired

shapes using a lightly floured cookie cut­ter and trans­fer cook­iesto the pre­pared bak­ing sheet. Place the bak­ing sheets with the unbaked cook­ies in the refrig­er­a­tor for 10 to 15 min­utes to chill the dough which pre­vents the cook­ies from spread­ing and los­ing their shape while baking.

Note: If you are not going to frost the baked cook­ies, you may want to sprin­kle the unbaked cook­ies with crys­tal or sparkling sugar.

Bake cook­ies for about 10 — 12 min­utes (depend­ing on size) or until they are firm around the edges. Remove from oven and let cook­ies cool on bak­ing sheet for a few min­utes before trans­fer­ring to a wire rack to fin­ish cool­ing. Frost with royal icing, if desired. Be sure that the frost­ing on the cook­ies dries com­pletely before stor­ing. (This may take sev­eral hours.) Frosted cook­ies will keep sev­eral days in an airtight

con­tainer. Store between lay­ers of parch­ment paper or wax paper.

Makes about 36 — 4 inch (10 cm) cookies.

BEST frosted with a cream cheese frost­ing.  I use the recipe on my site here and thin it with some milk to make it more like a glaze if I don’t want heavy frost­ing.  Also, I have rolled out fon­dant into the same shape as the cookie and placed it on top of a thin layer of the frost­ing which gives a nice finish!

For a final fin­ish on my fon­dant cov­ered cook­ies I used an impres­sion mat to make pretty pat­terns.. and then dusted with pearl dust.. there is no limit to what you can do with these or any other cook­ies!  Happy Baking!

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This is the cake I made for my daugh­ter Megan’s baby shower this past week­end.  The cake on the bot­tom was yel­low cake filled with white cream cheese frost­ing and then cov­ered with the same frost­ing coloured blue.  I added balls of choco­late fon­dant to the sides and for the circles.

Baby Shower Cake

The top cake was made using the good old Wilton Teddy Bear pan.  I made this for her first birth­day some 20+ years ago so thought it would be a nice touch for this cake.  The cake is choco­late cake and is iced with a choco­late flavoured cream cheese frost­ing.  The dia­per is thinly rolled white fon­dant made using Car­rie Big­gers’ recipe.  Sorry but I can’t give that to you here because Car­rie sells it on her web­site as one of her prod­uct range.  It’s a great recipe and tastes so much bet­ter than com­mer­cially pro­duced fon­dant.  I am always hor­ri­fied when I see the fon­dant being torn off of wed­ding cakes by folks that have only had the shop bought kind.  The home made stuff is so much nicer and very edible.

Ok, so I have to “fess up.”  Even expe­ri­enced bak­ers and dec­o­ra­tors make mis­takes.  Stu­pid mis­takes actu­ally.  That bear on the top took three attempts before I got it right.  I can’t believe it since I’ve made it many times before but the first time around I didn’t add enough bat­ter to the pan so when bear came out he had NO LEGS!  Um no.  That bear became choco­late cake balls that I put into the party favour boxes for our guests to take home with them, so not a total waste.

With my sec­ond attempt I totally for­got to insert the cone into the cen­ter of the pan which ensures even cook­ing.  Not real­iz­ing my mis­take I took the “per­fect” bear from the pan and then won­dered why his head was cav­ing in.  After a crack formed I could see that the bat­ter inside was still liq­uid and not even close to being cooked.  This poor bear met his demise down the garbage dis­posal.. sorry bear num­ber 2.

So finally at 11:30pm on Fri­day night (the party was the next day) I baked off bear num­ber 3.  You might think this one worked out per­fectly.  Well not exactly.  Prob­a­bly due to the fact that it had been one heck of a busy week I did remem­ber to insert the heat cone this time BUT for­got to spray it with cook­ing spray.  As I pulled it out a crack formed across poor bear’s face.  Thank good­ness for but­ter­cream which I used to patch him up with.

So next time you make a mis­take or for­get some­thing, don’t worry too much, we all do it!

Happy bak­ing!