My son decided that for his birthday, he wanted a Red Velvet cake. I don’t know if you know what that is, but a red velvet cake is a chocolate cake, but red in colour. But it’s not red in colour because of some mysterious ingredient, it’s red because you add so much red colouring that it overpowers the natural dark brown of the chocolate.

It does however, have some different ingredients. First – buttermilk. So I had to find this in the supermarket, but where, would it be buy the butter, or would it be by the milk. At first I thought butter, but obviously it was milk. And it turns out it’s not a particularly weird product, it was just in a bottle next to the other milks – and quite cheap. It turns out to be sort of a richer version of milk.

I also needed to find the red dye. But it can’t just be any red dye, it had to be red gel. Apparently, if I just use normal liquid food colouring then it will make the red cake green. The first supermarket I went in had every colour of gel except for red. I grabbed purple just in case but I ended up cycling over town late an night in the cold to grab the red gel from the other supermarket.

Which brings me to the other part of this. I ended up making this cake in the middle of the night and it took a couple of hours, I was exhausted. The recipes for red velvet cake on the internet were variable, lots of them had 1 start reviews, and more had four star averages but I could only find 1 star reviews. I finally settled on one of the 4 star reviews, where the one star seemed to say that there wasn’t enough chocolate in it. That seemed to be in the recipe so I was good to go.

The biggest problem was that it said it would cook in half an hour, but the mixture was barely done by the point, so I added another 15 minutes, and then another 5 – and finally it was complete.

Actually it turned out to be delicious. Mrs Rad iced it this morning and we just scoffed it down now.