So, someone mentioned “the dessert harmony in red” the other day, and it got me thinking. Sounded all fancy and artistic. My first thought was, yeah, right, more like “the kitchen disaster in red” if my past experiments are anything to go by. But it did remind me of this one time, a few years back, when I got obsessed with making something truly, deeply red.
I’d seen this picture, I think it was that Matisse painting, “Harmony in Red” or “The Red Room,” something like that. The red in it was just… wow. It covered everything, the table, the walls, but it wasn’t flat. There was stuff happening, patterns, a window looking out to a landscape, fruit on the table. It was intense, but somehow it all worked. The painting itself is called “The Dessert: Harmony in Red,” which is pretty direct, actually. So, silly me, I thought, I’m gonna capture that feeling, but in a cake.
My goal was a red velvet cake that wasn’t just reddish, but a full-on, vibrant, almost shocking red. My first try? Absolute chaos. I remember just pouring in red food coloring like there was no tomorrow. The batter looked promising, but it baked up this weird, dull, brownish-pink. Not quite the bold Fauvist statement I was going for, you know? And the kitchen! Looked like a scene from a horror movie. Red splatters everywhere. My white countertops were never quite the same, and I think the cat had a red paw for a week. What a mess.
I almost gave up. Just another one of those things that looks good in a painting but is a nightmare in real life. But that image of the painting stuck with me. How Matisse used that single, overwhelming red to unify the scene, the tablecloth and walls being the same color, yet you still got a sense of depth from the things around it. He was playing with how you see things, making something flat and deep at the same time. It wasn’t just about the color, but what the color did.
So, I went back to the drawing board, or, well, the mixing bowl. I did some reading. Turns out, just dumping in color isn’t the way. Who knew, right? For the next attempt, I tried a different approach. Less regular cocoa powder, which can make reds look muddy. I even experimented with a bit of beetroot powder – sounds weird, I know, but it gave this earthy undertone to the red, a richness that the food coloring alone couldn’t achieve. It was still red, very red, but it had… character.
And then the frosting. It had to be a stark contrast. A super simple, bright white cream cheese frosting. Nothing fancy, just pure white. When I finally cut into that cake, that’s when I felt I’d gotten somewhere. That deep, almost velvety red interior against the brilliant white. It wasn’t just a red cake anymore. It had that pop, that contrast, kind of like the fruits and the window in the painting, standing out against all that red.
It wasn’t a Matisse, obviously. My kitchen definitely didn’t look like a harmonious art studio. But getting that balance, that felt like a small victory. It’s funny how a simple thing like trying to bake a cake can make you think about these bigger ideas, like harmony and how colors work, or how an old painting from 1908 can kick off a whole messy project. That whole process, all the trial and error, the red-stained fingers, that was my “practice.” And remembering it now, well, that’s the “record,” I guess. Sometimes the most satisfying things aren’t perfect, but they teach you something along the way. A little bit of dessert, a little bit of harmony, found right there in all that red.
