Everything You Need To Know About Red Velvet Cake

Aside from the fact that it’s the tastiest dessert ever.

1. Let’s just get this out of the way: Red velvet cake is delicious and you should be eating it.

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2. As you may know, the cake is usually topped with yummy cream cheese frosting.

Though there are plenty of variations on that one.

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3. And if you haven’t figured it out already, the cake has a blood red interior.

Although some people think that the cake gets its color from a chemical reaction between the cocoa powder and baking soda, the truth is (usually) much simpler: a lot of red food coloring.

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4. Red velvet cake used to be colored with beets instead of food coloring. Yummy. (?)

During the food rationing of World War II, bakers used beets to enhance the color of their cakes.

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5. Chocolate is one of the main ingredients in red velvet cake.

Cocoa powder (unsweetened), to be exact.

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6. There’s an urban legend that the cake got its start at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City.

The legend goes that a chef at the Waldorf Astoria created the recipe for red velvet cake and it became a popular dessert at the hotel. The recipe leaked, however, when a customer wrote to the chef, asking for the recipe, and the chef sent it back to her with a $350 bill for it. Allegedly, the patron was so outraged by the bill that she forwarded the recipe in the form of a chain letter to her nearest and dearest socialite friends.

That patron would be a total badass, were this not just an urban myth.

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7. But in fact, we’re all victims of a marketing ploy.

The cake was invented during the Great Depression when everyone was hurting, including the folks at the food coloring company Adams Extract. To try and lure customers back to their product, the company created the Adams Red Velvet Cake recipe.

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8. The original tagline for the cake was this: “The cake of a wife time.”

Not even totally clear what that means.

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9. According to Facebook, the country with the highest number of red velvet cake fans is the United States.

Followed by Malaysia and the Philippines.

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10. Eating red velvet cupcakes is more beneficial* than working out.

*Based entirely off this famous quote of mysterious origins: “A red velvet cupcake makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.”

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11. A red velvet armadillo made its film debut in the 1989 classic “Steel Magnolias.”

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12. Jessica Simpson’s wedding cake of choice? Red velvet.

She chose a layered red velvet cake when she married Nick Lachey in 2002. R.I.P. that couple.

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13. And Emma Stone had this sage advice about what to do when faced with red velvet cake:

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