Hidden Heart Red Velvet & Vanilla Loaf Cake
This is one of my favourite and very easy fancy cake recipes! I have done it many times for different occasions (Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day etc) Depending what kind of shape cutters you have, you can create different themes! For Valentine’s Day I have, of course, used a heart shaped cutter.
Ingredients:
For the red velvet cake
175g unsalted butter at room temperature
175g caster sugar, I prefer the golden type for this cake
3 large eggs, organic or free range for preference
140g self-raising flour
½ tsp baking powder
85g ground almonds
2 tbsp cocoa powder
100ml milk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract (optional)
28ml bottle red food colouring (or any other colour you like!
For the vanilla cake (baking 1 hour)
175g unsalted butter at room temperature
175g caster sugar, as before I prefer the golden type
3 large eggs, organic or free range for preference
140g self-raising flour
½ tsp baking powder
85g ground almond
100ml milk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
TIP: Instead of vanilla, you could add some lemon or orange zest here, or whatever flavours you like. Have some fun and play around with different combinations.
Method:
First things first… we have to prepare our oven and our baking tins.
1.Preheat the oven to 160C/140C fan.
I do understand that the temperature is not as high as when we normally bake cakes but specifically for this one, we need slower baking, as we need to “double bake” one of our loafs.
2. Grease a loaf tin well or use one of the paper baking cases instead
3. Now we are ready to start with our cakes, the first to bake is the red velvet cake.
4. Beat the 175g butter and 175g sugar until they turn creamy, light and fluffy.
5. Then we add the 3 eggs, one at a time, until thoroughly combined.
6. In a separate bowl, mix the 140g flour, the 85g almonds, the 1⁄2 tsp baking powder and the cocoa together very well. Once they are mixed well, we add the dry ingredients into our butter/sugar/egg mixture.
7. Finally, we add the 1 1⁄2 tsp vanilla extract along with the food colouring in the 100ml milk and make sure the colour has been combined well to make sure that the texture and colour of the cake is correct. Then we we add it in the cake mixture and give it a couple of turns with the mixer until well combined.
8. We pour our cake mixture into the prepared loaf tin and it is ready to go into the oven. We will bake for 1 hr 10 mins in 160C/ 140 fan and we always check before we take it out, with a toothpick or a knife which should come out clean. If there is some mixture sticking to it, put the cake back in for a few more minutes.
10. We have to let it cool for approximately 10 minutes in the tin, and then put it on a wire rack.
11. When the cake totally cool, we cut our loaf into 4 pieces and then, using a 5cm cutter (any shape would do, depending on the time of the year… for Christmas could be a star, for Valentine’s Day could be a heart etc) , we cut out our shapes. You should end up with 4 hearts in this example.
TIP: We do not waste any cake at all. We keep the remaining pieces to make some gorgeous and delicious homemade, easy truffles!
12. While we are cooling down our red velvet cake, we can start doing the cake mixture for the vanilla one.
13. The procedure is exactly the same as for the first cake so repeat steps 1-7, but we skip the additional cocoa powder and the red food colouring.
14. When the second batch of cake mixture is ready, we add the half of our mixture into our loaf tin that we have cleaned and pre-prepared as we did the first time.
15. Then, very carefully we put the four pieces of our shaped cake (stars, hearts, flowers…) in the middle of our loaf, just like a sausage shape down the centre.
TIP: Be careful! Do not push it to the bottom, as we want our shape to be revealed when we cut the cake, not when the cake is not cut!
16. After we have placed the four red velvet pieces the one next to the other creating the pattern, we have to add the rest of our vanilla mixture and cover well our shaped red cake.
TIP: Covering the red shaped cake is important, as it will be double baked. If we manage to keep our shaped pieces in the middle, we will have a well baked vanilla cover cake and not dry out the second baked red velvet running through the centre.
17. Now, this cake is going into the oven for 1 hour, as we do not want to dry out the inside shaped cake.
18. Once the cake is ready, we do the test again with a toothpick or a knife to make sure that has been baked properly, we take it out of the oven and let it rest in the tin for approximately 10 minutes and then we transfer to a wire rack.
This cake looks lovely as it is, as you can see in the photos, but you might want to decorate the outside with some lovely chocolate ganache, royal icing, choco sprinkles or oreo crumbs would be fab.
….and if you want to change the flavour of the vanilla cake, that you can add some lemon or orange zest instead and flavour it to your taste!
Good luck, have fun experimenting with flavours and different shaped cutters, and enjoy!
