Red Velvet Cake has cornered the market in coloured cakes. It’s delicious, but why should Red Velvet have all the fun? This week I’ve been playing around with a recipe for Green Velvet Cake – just like Red Velvet, but green and just the thing for St Patrick’s Day.
Green cake might not be the first thing you think of if you’re baking for a celebration, but it’s certainly eye-catching and it’s absolutely a talking point. It tastes just like red velvet cake, but it’s green. It looks like it should be mint flavoured, if you want to add a few drops of peppermint flavouring then you could do.
I made some chocolate shamrocks and decorated my green velvet cake with them. It’s a very simple but effective way to decorate a cake and I’d recommend even novice bakers give it a try.
Green Velvet Cake
Ingredients:
2 eggs
235mls vegetable oil
235mls buttermilk
1 tablespoon of white vinegar
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
Green food colouring
320g self-raising flour
260g caster sugar
2 tablespoons of cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
For the frosting:
250g cream cheese
250g icing sugar, sifted
110g unsalted butter
How to make Green Velvet Cake:
Pre-heat your oven to 180° and grease and line 3 8 inch cake tins.
Pour the eggs, oil, buttermilk, vinegar and vanilla into a large bowl and whisk to combine. Add a few drops of food colouring ad then sift the flour, sugar, cocoa powder and baking powder into the bowl, mix well. Check you’re happy with the colour, if not, add a few more drops of colouring. Remember the shade will darken as it cooks, so don’t make the green too dark.
Pour the green cake batter into the three prepared cake tins. I usually weigh them to make sure they are more or less the same size.
Put the cakes in the oven for 18-20 minutes, until they’re cooked through. Once they’re baked, remove from the oven and leave to cool on a baking rack.
While they’re cooling you can make the frosting. Beat the cream cheese and butter together until light and fluffy, carefully sift in the icing sugar and combine well. Put the frosting in the fridge to firm up a little before using.
To put the green velvet cake together, level out the top of each cake by trimming off the top with a serrated knife, this is so they stack neater. Put a smear of icing on the bottom of your cake stand and put your first cake layer on, dollop on some frosting onto the top, spread it evenly over the layer and put the next cake on top of that. Frost the top of that layer, then turn the final cake upside down, so the top of the cake is absolutely flat. Cover the whole cake and sides with the remainder of the frosting and smooth it all over.
Decorate it however you like. I was making my green velvet cake for St Patrick’s Day, so I made chocolate shamrocks using a Cake Decor Milk Chocolate Writer tube which I’d found in Morrisons. It was really simple to use, I just made the shapes on baking paper, left them to set, peeled them off and put them on the cake. So simple and it looks pretty good too.
If you enjoyed this recipe, you might also like my Turkish Delight Cake.
