Cupcake mania is sweeping the big city. But is it happening for the right reasons?
There may not be a more perfect pastry on God’s green earth than red velvet cake. With its rich body accompanied by tangy cream cheese frosting—not to mention the larger-than-life color—red velvet manages to appeal to pretty much everyone. You need no further proof of that than bakeries specializing in gourmet cupcakes cropping up across Los Angeles and New York City, where red velvet has joined vanilla and chocolate among the classics. Reworking the decadent old-South recipe into a form that reminds busy big-city residents of their long-forgotten childhoods seems to have struck a nerve—or at least a taste bud. I’ve seen the resurgence attributed to the 1988 film Steel Magnolias, with its famous armadillo-shaped red velvet groom’s cake, or the 2002 nuptials of Nick Lachey to Jessica Simpson in her native Texas. While both have long since faded into the cultural landscape, perhaps it’s appropriate that the surging interest in a longtime Southern tradition counts the two largest cities in the U.S. as ground zero.
And I, for one, could not be more thrilled. A native Californian, the closest I can claim Southern heritage is through my mother, a Tar Heel born and bred in a rural mill town outside Charlotte, N.C. I also spent four years in North Carolina while I was in college. But the closest I ever came to reclaiming that heritage was through the dozens of church cookbooks my mother had collected from her hometown. When I was in high school and antsy to leave California, I’d flip through them, imagining the miraculous tastes I’d come to associate with the two weeks we spent in North Carolina every summer. Eventually, red velvet became my specialty.
It took a few tries—I went from the recipe in the Lutheran cookbook to the Southern Baptist and back again—but once I got the hang of it, my red velvet cakes became legendary. My mother began commissioning me to make them as treats for the neighbors every Christmas. And I didn’t mind; there was something so therapeutic about sculpting that cream cheese frosting over the cake fresh out of the Bundt pan and watching the first drops of red food coloring streak across the batter circulating through the Kitchen Aid.
Red velvet wasn’t something I got to experience in college—dorm kitchens aren’t so useful for that—but I was excited to discover that it had caught on in California once I had graduated and settled in the Los Angeles area. One of my roommates was from Texas, so we indulged our Southern sides with this latest L.A. trend. We trekked all over the city, sampling what various bakeries had to offer. My birthday “cakes” that first year came from one uber-hip institution called Doughboys; my friends and I went to the beach and chowed down on the moist cupcakes while watching the summer sun set into the Pacific Ocean. It was the perfect melding of the two places that I consider home.
But as our search took us further and more bakeries opened across the city, I came across a troubling phenomenon—faulty red velvet cake. The majority of cupcakes we sampled were bitter and dry, taking on more of a brownish hue than a red one. Yet at the same time, the local media kept talking about the wonders of red velvet—a sentiment I didn’t disagree with, but I couldn’t understand how they could believe it with such disappointing cupcakes in hand. I finally got a clue on LAist, a local blog where, in a guide to navigating the hysteria surrounding area bakeries, one writer described red velvet as “a light chocolate cake.”
For me, there’s no way that anyone could believe that red velvet cake is comparable to chocolate. Yes, many traditional Southern recipes for red velvet cake call for a small amount of cocoa, but it did not seem possible to me that its complex flavors—the dense buttery taste, the dark notes that play across the tongue, the slightest bit of fruit punch flavor that’s probably just a psychological reaction to the color of the cake—could ever be mistaken for something so run-of-the-mill. It actually made me sad that my fellow Angelenos had been led to believe that red velvet wasn’t nearly as wonderful as it could be.
The final straw came when I went to New York City for a long weekend, and on my first night there, took the subway from my hotel down to Greenwich Village. There, I waited in line for 20 minutes just to be let into the mother ship—Magnolia Bakery, the famous Manhattan cupcake emporium with its own cookbook that Carrie Bradshaw visited and received its own rap on Saturday Night Live. After I escaped with my bounty of red velvet cupcakes, I retreated to my hotel room for what I was sure was going to be a moving experience. One bite and…confusion set in. What I was holding in my hand was not only a bitter chocolate “red velvet” cupcake, but it was topped with whipped cream frosting. The Lutheran church ladies almost certainly screamed in horror at that moment.
The experience called for a cleansing of sorts, so once I returned to L.A., I pulled out my own recipe for good measure. My roommate attempted her grandmother’s recipe, with its traditional scoop of cocoa, and I trusted my time-tested one without a trace of chocolate whatsoever. Both were splendid, the chocolate in the one recipe simply serving to enhance the taste of what makes red velvet red velvet, even if it’s not something so easy to describe.
Maybe, in the end, the chocolate-ifying of red velvet in California is nothing more than what happens to other ethnic cuisine when it hits the United States; you’d be hard-pressed to find American-style pizza in Italy or egg drop soup in China. But to me, those are variations on an original idea that have developed and matured into new dishes. To me, red velvet will never be mistaken for chocolate—it is a flavor, a being, all on its own. No matter what the trendy people say.
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So this is a piece I’ve had on my laptop for a few years. Every once in a while, I would go back and tinker with something else, but only two people have read it over that time. And while the cupcake thing still seems to be going somewhat strong—at least here in L.A.—it will inevitably fall out of favor…so by the time I have the time to shop this around, it’ll be horribly out of date. So you all got it instead.
Hope you enjoyed it…and that you didn’t read it on an empty stomach.
