Easy Red Velvet Cookies Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is red velvet cookie made of? ›

Whisk flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl. Beat butter with an electric mixer until fluffy, about 2 minutes; beat in brown sugar and white sugar until smooth, about 1 minute. Beat egg, milk, and vanilla extract into butter mixture; beat in food coloring until uniformly colored.

Cream Cheese Frosting – A silky, tangy cream cheese frosting is the perfect compliment to these cookies. They taste exactly like classic red velvet cake in cookie form!

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

Today, red velvet cake is made by combining cocoa powder, butter, sugar, eggs, and flour as well as buttermilk, vinegar, and red food coloring that gives the cake its iconic red tint. In a classic red velvet cake, cream cheese frosting is paired but the cake can be really be frosted with anything.

What flavor is red velvet? While there are cocoa undertones, red velvet is not chocolate cake because it balances both chocolate and vanilla flavors. It contains cocoa but not the same quantity as traditional chocolate cake, resulting in a more subtle cocoa flavor and tanginess due to the buttermilk and vinegar.

Tinting the Dough

If you skip the food coloring, the cookies will be light brown. For the pictured cookies, I use 3/4 teaspoon gel food coloring. You can control how vibrant the red color is, so use more or less depending on the color you'd like.

Red velvet cake is a Southern American delight that blends a vanilla cake with a striking red hue from food coloring, mixed with several tablespoons of cocoa powder. Its cake batter gets a tangy kick from buttermilk and white vinegar, perfectly offsetting the sweetness of the classic cream butter-cheese frosting.

Gel food colourings are best when baking, as they keep their colour when baked and less is needed to achieve a good result.

Softened butter and melted butter are not the same. Using melted butter will change the texture of whatever you're baking. If you only want the butter to soften for spreading, microwave it on the Defrost setting (30%) in 5-second increments until it's softened as desired.

Does adding more butter make cookies softer? ›

Also, underbaking them by a minute or 2 will help them retain a dense, chewy bite, explains Jenny McCoy, pastry baking arts chef-instructor at the Institute for Culinary Education in New York. Adding more moisture to your dough in the form of extra butter, egg yolks, or brown sugar will make your cookies even softer.

Flour adds fluff and texture to the cookies. Adding too little flour can cause cookies to be flat, greasy, and crispy. Most recipes assume you'll use all-purpose, but if you want a lighter, crumblier cookie texture, choose one with a lower protein content such as cake-and-pastry flour.

So long as they end up evenly flat, that is; squashing cookies haphazardly under your palm means they may bake and brown unevenly. Still, if you care deeply (or even casually) about the look of your cookies, you can take the flattening step as an opportunity for enhancement.

No, Red Velvet Cake is not just Chocolate Cake. While both Red Velvet Cake and Chocolate Cake use cocoa, that's where the similarities basically end. Chocolate Cake is made with Dutch processed cocoa, melted chocolate, or both.

On top of having all the typical cake ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, and eggs), red velvet cake is also comprised of cocoa powder, buttermilk, and vinegar. When combined, these ingredients create the color as the cocoa powder reacts to the acids.

Most chocolate desserts have large amounts of cocoa powder and/or melted chocolate bars giving them an intense chocolate flavor. Red velvet on the other hand is far more complex. It has a vanilla base, but with the raw cocoa powder it has a soft and velvety crumb and a subtle chocolate flavor.

Due to the fact that it uses cocoa powder rather than chocolate, red velvet cake is more subtle in chocolate flavor than a chocolate cake. In terms of the cocoa flavor concentration, we like to think of red velvet cake as somewhere between a vanilla/white cake and a chocolate cake.