SEEING RED
The Resurrection of Red Velvet Cake

By Judiaann Woo

Every so often, without anyone anywhere making a command decision, a single item will appear at the same moment on menus all over the country, in disparate and far flung locations, from big cities to small town bakeries. There gives rise to a shared spontaneous good idea, a grassroots movement that makes up in breadth what it lacks in direction and a trend is born. One day we have chocolate cake. The next day our chocolate cake is molten.

This is such a moment of culinary zeitgeist for red velvet cake. Of course, now is not the moment of its emergence. The south has had red velvet cake for decades (although its true origins remain unclear), but it is a time of resurgence for this old-fashioned layer cake. Thankfully, red velvet is not as omnipresent as molten chocolate cake, but it takes the cake (pun intended) at being the most misunderstood flavor by both fans and those that have never tasted the cake before.

	A taste of The Apprentice in gelato form.

What does red velvet cake taste like? Considering its burgeoning popularity, this simple question stumps more than a few. On last season's episode of the NBC hit reality show The Apprentice, a team of tycoon wanna-bes created Red Velvet Cake ice cream to compete with rival team flavor Vanilla Donut Dream. Their bright pink concoction consisted of white chocolate, cocoa, and raspberries. Raspberries? I was thinking "You're fired!" way before The Donald.

Red velvet cake does not contain berries. What it does contain is a small amount of cocoa powder (though not enough to qualify it as a true chocolate cake) and an alarming amount—up to a cup in come cases—of artificial food coloring. However, red food coloring is essentially flavorless, so I believe it is the crimson that influences people to think that maybe there should be raspberries or other natural sources of redness in the mix. I should also note that red velvet is always iced with cream cheese frosting and often coated with chopped pecans.

Red and sultry in an ad by designer Vera Wang.

In her book, A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman writes, "There is more to seeing than mere seeing. The visual image is a kind of trip wire for the emotions." In the case of red velvet cake, the suggestive power of the color allows many who enjoy the cake to project qualities onto it that may not be present. Red is one of the most powerfully evocative colors. Exposure to the color has the power to excite the human brain. Ackerman cites a University of Texas study that demonstrates that when surrounded by the scarlet shade, grip strength of research subjects "became 13.5% stronger."

Duncan Hines introduces a boxed version that's heavy on the chocolate.

Eating is visual. How something looks influences our experience of it in ways just as profound as aroma and taste. We become accustomed to foods looking a certain way, like cheddar cheese being orange, even though we understand it to be only cosmetic. Red velvet cake is essentially just your basic cake: flour, sugar, eggs, butter, etc., but included in that is some cocoa and a whole lot of red, and that seems to make all the difference. Red is the color of passion, the color of blood. It is one of the colors that we seem compelled to infuse with personal meaning. The rise of red velvet cake is the triumph of the suggestive power of the visual. Red velvet... the name itself is an image, preparing you for the luxury and decadence that awaits you between the deep, plush layers that look too sinfully good to be true.

RED VELVET CAKE

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