A Red velvet cake is a cake with a dark red, bright red or red-brown color. It is usually prepared as a layer cake with either a vanilla or chocolate flavor, topped with a creamy white icing. Common ingredients are buttermilk, butter, flour, cocoa, and beetroot or red food coloring (beetroot is traditionally used). The amount of cocoa used varies in different recipes. Cream cheese frosting is most commonly paired with the cake, as well as buttercream.
James Beard's 1972 reference American Cookery describes three red velvet cakes varying in the amounts of shortening and butter. All use red food coloring, but the reaction of acidic vinegar and buttermilk tends to better reveal the red anthocyanin in the cocoa. Before more alkaline "Dutch Processed" cocoa was widely available, the red color would have been more pronounced. This natural tinting may have been the source for the name "Red Velvet" as well as "Devil's Food" and similar names for chocolate cakes. While foods were rationed during World War II, bakers used boiled beets to enhance the color of their cakes. Boiled grated beets or beet baby food are found in some red velvet cake recipes, where they also serve to retain moisture.
A red velvet cake was a signature dessert at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City during the 1920s. According to a common urban legend of the 1960s a woman once asked for the recipe for the cake, and was billed a large amount. Indignant, she spread the recipe in a chain letter.
In Canada the cake was a well-known dessert in the restaurants and bakeries of the Eaton's department store chain in the 1940s and 1950s. Promoted as an exclusive Eaton's recipe, with employees who knew the recipe sworn to silence, many mistakenly believed the cake to be the invention of the department store matriarch, Lady Eaton.
A resurgence in the popularity of this cake is partly attributed to the 1989 film Steel Magnolias in which the groom's cake (a southern tradition) is a red velvet cake made in the shape of an armadillo.