Hello!

I'm new to this, so forgive me if I leave something out :)

I recently made my great grandma's red velvet recipe for the first time. It was challenging, and I had a couple issues. My grandma makes it every year perfectly, the layers are always so light and fluffy, it's my favorite. 

Her directions were as follows:

Mix butter and sugar, add eggs and mix until fluffy. Make paste of vinegar and cocoa, then add the butter mix to the paste. Sift salt, baking soda, and flour together and add alternating with buttermilk, mix. Blend well and stir in vanilla and food color. Bake around 30 minutes at 350. 

I didn't include too much about her actual recipe, just because hers have always been delicious, so it had to have been some user error on my part.

The issue I experienced was that my cake was incredibly crunchy around the edges, and even almost looked caramelized, for the lack of a better word, on top and on the edges,even though I followed her directions per usual in lining the cake pan in crisco and flour.  It also was incredibly dense on the inside and what I would consider too moist. It was like eating a wet sponge on the inside, in my opinion. Nothing like hers have always turned out. It was good, but not the consistency I'm used to/wanted at all. The only deviation from her recipe was that I do not own an actual sifter, so I tried my best at improvising with a colander. I suspected that it needed to bake more, but if I had done so, the edges and tops would have been absolute toast.

Any ideas as to what went wrong? And solutions for next time? I'm hoping to try again tonight for a holiday party. 

pure technique -- that doesn't usually transfer over through a recipe card like you would want -- 

• so do you have an oven thermometer --
• have you baked many cakes from scratch --
• did you cream your butter sugar till it was pretty fluffy --
• how warm was your butter --
• what kind of mixer did you use --
• when you added the eggs --
• did you beat that well so it was a nice smoothy smooth emulsion -- 
• how long did you you mix it after you added the last bit of flour --
• did you use the flour listed in the recipe --
• did you substitute anything else --

"smoothy smooth emulsion"  I like that   :)

Don't know what size of cake you made  but when I made an 11 x 15 red velvet, (my recipe was actually doubled) I  cooked it at 300 degrees for about 30 minutes then turned oven to 325 and cooked for another 20 to 30 minutes checking it with cake tester towards the end.  This valuable information I got was from Kakeladi and It turned out so light and fluffy and was amazing. I actually had enough batter left over to make 8 cupcakes which I gave to my neighbor.  I filled my pan 2/3 full. The lower temperature really did the trick!!!

me_me1 --

high five