It's Your Birthday!

The tenth painting in my bourbon series pairs Old Forester’s Birthday Bourbon from 2016 with a jumbo red velvet cupcake sprinkled with chocolate chips.  As stated by Old Forester,  “the 2016 Birthday Bourbon barrel selection commemorates the 15^thanniversary of the first-ever release. Unlike various previous selections, where barrels were drawn from different warehouses and/or floors and locations with a warehouse the 2016 release has uniquely matured together on the same floor within the same warehouse. For the 2016 selection, all of the bourbon matured in a very warm location giving it a deep, rich oak forward personality.”

From Wikipedia, “when foods were rationed during World War II, bakers used boiled beet juices to enhance the color of their cakes.  Beets are found in some red velvet cake recipes. Beets were and are in some recipes used as filler or to retain moisture. Adams Extract, a Texas company, is credited with bringing the red velvet cake to kitchens across America during the Great Depression era, by being one of the first to sell red food coloring and other flavor extracts with the use of point-of-sale posters and tear-off recipe cards.

The cake and its original recipe are well known in the United States from New York City's famous Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which has dubbed the confection Waldorf-Astoria cake. However, it is widely considered a Southern recipe. Traditionally, red velvet cake is iced with a French-style butter roux icing(also called ermine icing), which is very light and fluffy, but time-consuming to prepare. Cream cheese frosting and buttercreamfrosting are variations which have increased in popularity.”