The Cake-Inspired Flavor Upgrade To Try On Your Next Batch Of Brownies

The color red, and chocolate. Many people might hear these words and immediately think of Valentine's Day. But if you've got baked goods on the brain, your mind might have jumped to red velvet cake. While red velvet cake isn't particularly chocolatey, it does contain cocoa powder; this, paired with a generous squirt of red food coloring, gives the cake its signature scarlet hue. Its unique flavor and texture comes from a combination of cocoa powder, buttermilk, and vinegar — and don't forget some dreamy, creamy, cream cheese frosting.

If you enjoy red velvet cake but think it could be improved by amping up chocolate flavor, consider making red velvet brownies. You'll get all the gooey chocolatey flavors of a brownie, plus the eye-catching color of red velvet. It's the perfect dessert for Valentine's Day — or any time you're craving an extra-special treat.

Most recipes for red velvet brownies incorporate food coloring and something like white chocolate chips as a frosting stand-in. They don't necessarily require buttermilk or vinegar. Basically, you can tweak your favorite brownie recipe to create something that looks totally new, but there are a few different ways to do so.

Let's start simple. These can be homemade or whipped up using a box of brownie mix (just don't forget to upgrade your boxed brownies by adding butter instead of oil!). Make your brownies as usual, but color the batter with red food coloring after you've added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. Then, stir in white chocolate chunks before pouring the batter into the pan. Consider using a gel or powdered food dye rather than liquid so you don't have to add too much additional liquid to the batter. Gel food dyes are also more vibrant than liquid, which is especially desirable in a red velvet dessert.

A slightly more difficult but very stylish variation is to do a red-dyed brownie with a cream cheese swirl. After your brownie batter is in the pan, top it with a mixture of cream cheese, sugar, and egg, swirling it through to create a beautiful pattern before baking.

A final method would be to bake red brownies, and top them with a cream cheese frosting. This will look more like a traditional slice of sheet cake, but with that squidgy brownie texture. For any of these methods, if you want to make your brownies slightly more reminiscent of the original cake, go ahead and toss in a teaspoon of white vinegar when mixing the wet ingredients.

Incidentally, red velvet cake's cousin, pink velvet cake, is essentially red velvet without the cocoa powder and less food coloring. You could easily make pink velvet cake-inspired blondies by tinting them pink and studding them with white chocolate. No doubt the pair would look beautiful side-by-side on a dessert bar!