When I got an invitation to an “Iron Chef: Cocoa” potluck, the first thing that popped into my mind was red velvet cake. February is the month of Valentine’s Day, after all.I found some red velvet ice cream recipes online that involved crumbling red velvet cupcakes into ice cream. But that’s not how I roll. I am not going to waste perfectly good red velvet cupcakes and I’m not developing Blizzard flavor ideas for Dairy Queen here. I want to make ice cream that actually tastes like the flavor in question, not vanilla ice cream with stuff mixed into it.

For the Iron Chef competition, I decided to make an ice cream terrine. The idea was for it to look and taste like a red velvet layer cake. I had made cream cheese ice cream before, but I had to develop a red velvet-inspired ice cream. To really pack in the flavor, I made red velvet cake batter ice cream.

While researching my recipe, I found an interesting and informative article about the history of red velvet cake (no longer online, but thanks Wayback Machine!). The author of this article developed a red velvet cake recipe using red wine to replace the red food coloring and acid (vinegar or buttermilk) that is in most traditional recipes. While I was intrigued by this recipe, I actually like traditional bright red velvet cake and wanted to approximate it as best as I could in ice cream. To my usual mix of dairy and sugar, I added a little buttermilk, butter, cocoa, and butter cake mix, and “no taste” red food coloring paste and, what do you know? It tasted like cake batter with a hint of cocoa and it was velvety in texture. Of course, I had to get a red velvet cupcake for the photo of the finished red velvet cake batter ice cream.

I wanted to get a photo of my terrine next to the cupcake, but that would have required me to wait another day to eat the cupcake. Like that was going to happen. Happy Valentine’s Day!