Red Velvet Mini Cakes

I am well and truly back now! So my Friday was completely and utterly taken up with making some seriously tasty Red Velvet Cake. It's a funny thing, I have eaten ALOT of red velvet, I have however until today never attempted to make it.
I am delighted with the finished results taste. I did want it to be more Red however its still tastes good and its trial and error with your colors I guess.
I decided to turn these into small mini cakes as they are easier to give away meaning less food waste at the end of my baking. For the same reason I also decided to make some Red Velvet Jars! I was so silly excited when I put those together! Other then making some Salads in a jar during the summer these are my first sweet jar treats!
Obviously this was the choice I made. However if you want to make just one big cake that is perfectly fine too. you just need to separate your cake batter into 2/3 tins depending on how many layers you want your cake to be.

So to bring you the recipe, I trolled around on a millions sites for different recipes as I wanted my cake to be super moist and I have heard that can be hard to find so I pretty much made my own recipe from other cakes I have made before combined with many ideas from many different places and It definitely worked as the cakes are Decedent.

Cake Ingredients:

- 2 1/4 cups Self Raising Flour
- 1 tbsp cocoa powder
- 2 tbsp red food coloring (you can use more or less depending on your desired finished color)
- 2 eggs
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 2 cups caster (bakers) sugar
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 cup canola oil (you can also use vegetable oil)
- 1 cup low fat butter milk
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp distilled vinegar

Cream cheese Icing Ingredients:

- 1 pound cream cheese
- 4 cups Icing (Confectionary) Sugar
- 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 2 sticks of butter (I use unsalted)

Method

• Preheat the Oven to 350℉ and then oil and flour your cake tin/s.
• Using a Large Mixing Bowl sift in the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, cocoa and set aside
• In a separate large bowl mix together the oil, buttermilk, eggs, food coloring, vinegar, and vanilla extract. You can now add this mix into the dry mix and beat until it is a smooth batter. 
• Pour the batter evening into your cake pan/s, and pop them into the pre heated oven. 
• It will take between 20 - 30 minutes to bake. Once the sides of the cake come away from the tin and a skewer comes out clean then the cake is baked. Do keep an eye on them as you don't want to over cook them or they will be too dry. 
• Once the cake is done take it out of the cake pans and leave to cool on a wire rack. Then move it to the fridge to firm up before you ice them.
• For the Icing beat the butter and the icing sugar together until smooth then add the cream cheese and the vanilla extract. Move this to the fridge and use when cold. 
• Obviously it depends if you are making mini cakes, a full size cake of throwing everything into a jar on how you are going to decorate everything but basically apply about a 1/4 - 1/2 inch of icing in between your layers of cake and and then cover the entire cake in the icing. You can make these nice and smooth do some fancy designs with a piping bag.