Don't break the milk!

This weekend I made red velvet cupcakes to take to a wine and dessert party.

Red velvet, according to the cookbook for the Buttercup Bake Shop (an offshoot of the famous Magnolia Bakery in Greenwich Village), is "a yellow cake with a hint of cocoa, dyed a deep beautiful red." If you've seen Steel Magnolias, the armadillo cake is red velvet. We freely adopt Southern traditions, such as B's growing seersucker collection, so it was just a matter of time before we tried red velvet cake. We considered serving red velvet cupcakes at our wedding but were worried that people would be scared of them.

Being scared would be understandable. The cake batter was the color of a male cardinal (the bird, not a church official). Eating a red cake is a little strange, but come on, it's cake--how bad can it be? Plus red is significantly less weird than, say, a blue velvet or green velvet cake might be.

Making the cake batter was easy (as is any recipe that lets me use my KitchenAid mixer), but the frosting presented a challenge. Here are the instructions:

"In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, whisk to combine the milk and flour. Stir constantly over medium-high head until smoother and thick (anywhere from 12 to 18 minutes)."

I had a few issues with this command.

Anyone who has ever cooked milk on medium-high heat has probably also burned milk because it's nearly impossible to heat milk to that temperature without scalding it. And when your milk gets to that temperature, you run the risk of "breaking" it--we learned about this phenomenon in a French cooking class when we were trying to make a souffle with light whipping cream. Apparently, unless you're working with heavy whipping cream, you run the risk of breaking your light whipping cream or milk when you boil it, and it turns into a clumpy, oatmeal-like mess. I don't know what the chemistry explanation is, but maybe curds and whey are involved? Anyway, the lesson I learned was that boiling milk is a dangerous idea, and stirring does not always prevent burning.

I was determined to follow the recipe but with a minor modification. Stirring was not going to save my pan from burned milk, so whisking was the only option. And whisk, I did--for 12 minutes straight--ouch. My right arm looked like Popeye's when I finished (ok, it totally didn't, though it felt like it might fall off--does that count for something?), but I didn't burn the milk, and the frosting and cupcakes turned out great.