The Sleepy Cook: Red Velvet Parfaits & Why I shouldn’t get overly ambitious these days.

I’m really not a bad cook. I promise. After this, you may not believe me, but I assure you that I’m not. I had been thinking about writing a blog about the kind of food I’ve been cooking lately: easy food… lazy food… whatever you want to call it. Anyway, tomorrow is the Hubster’s birthday, and for months I have been planning on making him The Pioneer Woman's red velvet cake, since that’s his favorite kind. I know that homemade red velvet cake doesn’t really go along with the “easy” thing, but it’s not really hard, and it was going to be a sheet cake, so as far as homemade cakes go, this was going to do the trick.

Well, it’s days like today that remind me why I don’t mind being such a lazy cook sometimes. I guess that I needed today to get me back on track!

Start with a cup of buttermilk.

Then add two whole eggs.

Then add one teaspoon of vanilla extract and a teaspoon of baking soda.

Now stir it up. Go ahead and use your measuring spoon; I don’t care.

Then, if you forgot to add the vinegar (like I did), go ahead and add one and a half teaspoons now, and stir it up again. It will get nice and frothy.

Next, in a small bowl, add the food coloring.

And if you accidentally only bought one fluid ounce of red food coloring (like I did), add some water to get it up to one and a half fluid ounces of liquid. I would assume that you could use one and a half ounces of water (and no food coloring) if you are worried about the side effects, but I’m sure that I wouldn’t want to hear the response that I would get if I served a red-less red velvet cake.

Then add one and a half teaspoons of cocoa powder to the food coloring.

And stir. Be careful with the plastic knife…

or you may cut yourself. Okay, maybe it’s just where I splashed the food coloring all over the place, but it looks pretty gruesome, doesn’t it?

On that note, does anyone know how to get food coloring out of wood? Or off of a window seal? Don’t ask.

Next, cream together a cup of shortening and one and three-fourths of a cup of sugar.

Then measure out two and a half cups of cake flour and pour it into the shortening-sugar mixture, and mix. No I didn’t sift my flour. Who actually does that? Anyone?

Then pour in half of the buttermilk mixture, and mix.

Then finish mixing in the flour.

And finish mixing in the wet mixture.

Then, if you forgot to mix the salt in with the flour, add it now.

Add the red mixture.

It will kind of look like a scene from Dexter.

Mix it until it’s all a beautiful scarlet hue. (Wow! That was cheesy!!)

Then spray the heck out of a sheet cake pan with some Pam, and pour the batter in. Bake the cake in a preheated 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes. (The original recipe said 20 minutes, but it took mine more like 25.)

While the cake it baking, make the icing. Start with a cup of milk.

Pour it into a sauce pan, and add five tablespoons of flour to it.

Whisk the mixture until it gets thick.

You won’t be expecting it, but it will get thick very quickly. Trust me, one second it was liquid, and then the next second it looked like this.

Remove from heat and let it cool completely.

While that’s cooling, cream the heck out of a cup of butter and a cup of granulated sugar, then just leave it for a few minutes while the milk-flour mixture finished cooling.

Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool for 20 minutes, then invert the cake pan onto a large cutting board. DO NOT RUSH THIS STEP! The Hubster was on his way home from work, so I gave the cake pan a whack on the cutting board.

And this happened.

Then, stir a teaspoon of vanilla into the cooled milk-flour mixture, and add that to the sugar-butter mixture.

And beat the H-E-DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS out of it. I mean, really give it a run for its money. All of this icing beating gave me time to brainstorm about how I was going to salvage the Hubster’s birthday dessert. Did I mention that at this point I was doing this all one handed, because I was holding the Bunny in my other arm? Well I was, and somehow the Bunny or I (or the Bunny and I) knocked the bowl of icing off the counter. Too bad I didn’t get a picture of the crime scene, because I’m sure that it would have been funny to an outsider. There was icing all over the Bunny. There was icing all over me. There was icing all over the floor, the wall, the fridge, the oven. There was icing all over everything, and the Bunny was eating it faster than I could clean it up. Oh yeah, we lost over half of the icing in this fiasco. However, if you don’t ruin most of your icing, go ahead and stick a spoon in for a taste test. And then repeat. Then maybe again. It’s just that good!

So how to fix this? Waterford Crystal makes everything better, right? Please tell me that it does!

Well, I did the rest one-handed, so there aren’t many more pictures, but crumble up some of the ruined cake and put it in the champagne flute (or your parfait vessel of choice), and alternate layers of crumbled cake and icing, finishing with icing on top.

Finish the parfait with a candle. Of course, we didn’t have anything to light the candle with (it was just the kind of day where even that didn’t work out), but we have mini horses in our backyard, so that makes up for the flameless candle thing, right? “What about the rest of the cake?” you ask.

Well, I chopped some of it up, and turned it into a disappointingly under-iced trifle.

And the rest is still on the cutting board. Free to a good home.

If you can manage to get your cake out in one piece (literally), go ahead and ice it, and eat it the way cakes were made to be eaten. That just wasn’t in the cards for us today. This whole incident really took me down a notch, and I promise that it will only be easy recipes from now on. Well, I can’t promise that, but it will be easy recipes for a little while, at least.

Oh yeah. If your child gets really quiet in the corner of the kitchen, make sure that he isn’t doing this: