Sweet Nostalgia

"Melissa Mileto had never made a red velvet cake in the years she’d worked at Take the Cake, a small bakery in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district that she later bought and relocated to the city’s Northside neighborhood. The Baltimore native was certainly familiar with the dessert — it is a perennial favorite south of the Mason-Dixon Line, despite a story that it was first concocted in Yankee territory (New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel) during the 1920s. It even made an appearance in “Steel Magnolias,” a 1989 movie set in small-town Louisiana, as an armadillo-shaped groom’s cake. Some bakers and food historians credit that cameo with red velvet cake’s return to fashion throughout the country, a comeback sustained by celebrities such as singer Jessica Simpson, who served it at her 2002 wedding to Nick Lachey. But Mileto’s Queen City customers never asked for one, despite their over-the-river proximity to Kentucky and the rest of the South.

That all changed a little over a year ago. Suddenly, Mileto and co-owner Doug Faulkner were besieged by requests for red velvet cake.

“Martha Stewart did it, and everybody else wanted it,” Faulkner says with a verbal shrug when asked to explain their customers’ sudden desire for the confection.

He admits that he initially turned people away simply because he didn’t like using the large amounts of red food coloring needed to achieve the signature color. Mileto, however, believed red velvet cake complemented Take the Cake’s reputation for “comfort baking.” One of their first orders for a red velvet cake, appropriately enough, came from Xavier University for a wrap party after the school’s stage production of “Steel Magnolias.”

“When people keep asking,” Faulkner adds, “you do it.”

Faulkner found Take the Cake’s recipe in an old southern cookbook, the title of which he declines to divulge, making a few minor adjustments to the original. He replaced the half cup of vegetable shortening in the original recipe with a half cup of butter. “It has a better flavor, and it’s natural,” he says. Yet he and Mileto stuck with a relatively modest two tablespoons of cocoa, an amount that results in just a hint of chocolate flavor. He also stresses the importance of mixing the batter exactly as instructed; blending the vinegar and baking soda — the two ingredients that together act as a leavening agent — and beating this mixture into the batter should be the absolute last step.

“I’ve tried other ways to make it easier, and it doesn’t turn out,” he warns.

Farther south, in West Portsmouth, Debbie Blevins has been making red velvet cakes at her Union Mills Confectionery ever since she opened the bakery in 1997. Her recipe, which she got from a childhood neighbor, is similar to Take the Cake’s, although it doubles the food coloring from one ounce to two. She uses shortening instead of butter (changes in the formulation of Crisco have driven her to a commercial brand, she notes). And she insists on sifting her flour two or three times after measuring.

“That makes it real light,” she says.

But the real difference is the icing on the cake: Blevins uses a cooked vanilla frosting instead of a cream-cheese counterpart, either of which is traditional. She admits the former takes more work — cooking a mixture of sugar, flour and milk from two to seven minutes over medium heat, allowing the resulting paste to cool, and then beating with a mixer for five minutes after adding the final ingredients. The effort, however, is worth it for those who, like her, prefer a less-sweet icing with a velvety smooth consistency.

Some people have told Blevins that her original icing recipe doesn’t yield enough for a 9-inch layer cake. To avoid disappointment, she suggests that frosting lovers should double the recipe.

“I don’t care that much for icing,” she says, “so it was plenty for me.”