Betty Crocker Red Velvet Cake Mix & Halloween Bakes!

What could be a more perfect cake to bake for Halloween than a red velvet cake? It adds to the creepiness of the Halloween cake if the insides are bright red! I absolutely love red velvet cake and I've tried many times to create my own at home but they always turn out a disappointing pinky brown shade. The cake mixes from US makers Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker have always been fantastic for creating deliciously blood red cakes so I was excited to hear that Betty Crocker was releasing a Red Velvet Cake Mix to the UK market. After some searching I finally found some at Sainsbury's on offer for £1.39 (usual price £2.09).

I decided to use this cake mix to make a spooky "white mice graveyard" traybake. The cake mix is extremely easy to make and simply required 3 eggs, some water and oil to complete. It was nice to have all the amounts given in UK friendly measurements too.

Once all the extra ingredients had been mixed together I could tell this cake mix would not have the same intense red as the US imports. I have no doubt the ingredients have been changed to lessen the amount of artificial colourings.

Once baked the cake had a nice deep reddish brown colour. The red is still prominent enough to ensure that this is unmistakably a red velvet cake. Because there was such a generous amount of cake mix I was able to make a 12 inch traybake and still had enough to fill twelve muffin cases (only eight are pictured as four were eaten straight out of the oven! Not by me I hasten to add).

My kids had loads of fun decorating their "white mice graveyard". We used white chocolate mice, Nice biscuits, crushed Oreo biscuits and Reese's pieces to decorate the traybake. We also used orange icing to create some fiendish pumpkins. It turned out fantastically well, even if I do say so myself. We all felt quite proud of ourselves with the finished result!

The idea for this came from a Sainsbury's instore leaflet so thank you to them for the inspiration!

I kept the muffins simple and just finished them off with some chocolate icing and orange Reece's Pieces. They look great displayed on this fabulous Halloween cupcake stand from Poundland, although quite a few had disappeared (again!) by the time I took this photo. Once the cakes are cut the reddish brown colour reveals itself, adding a bit more gore to our Halloween bakes.

Even though the Betty Crocker Red Velvet Cake was not as bright as it's US counterpart it still had the same fantastic taste. As Betty would say the cakes are "super moist" with a rich chocolate flavour. Now I'm off to make a cup of tea and enjoy some of this baking!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!