This Chocolate Dessert Is The Spawn Of Mahogany Cake, And Its Name Sounds Evil

It's sad to imagine such a world, but until mahogany cake came along, chocolate cake just wasn't really a thing. While cakes had been around for centuries, chocolate did not become widely available until the middle of the 19th century, when new industrial processing methods made it more affordable, and led to the introduction of products like cocoa powder. Not long after that, the first chocolate cake recipes began appearing in American cookbooks, and the grandparent of them all was mahogany cake. This was the earliest known chocolate cake, and it spawned a whole family of recipes, including red velvet cake and eventually devil's food cake.

How mahogany cake grew into red velvet and devil's food has to do with the cake recipes it evolved from. Mahogany cake is a type of "velvet cake," which was an entire category of cakes in the Victorian era. Velvet cakes got their name from the technique of mixing vinegar or buttermilk with baking soda. The chemical reaction created more lift than previous cake recipes, giving them a lighter, softer texture compared to the denser cake recipes of old. The addition of cocoa powder to these recipes caused another chemical reaction that released red pigments in the natural cacao used at the time, creating the color that gave mahogany cake, and eventually red velvet cake, their names. This chocolate velvet cake combo also formed the basis of devil's food cake, which arose not long afterward in response to another popular cake of the time.

One of the fluffy velvet cakes of the era was angel's food cake. After the addition of chocolate to cakes became more popular, devil's food cake was created as a deliberate foil to angel's food. Originally, the color itself was more of the point, and early versions of devil's food cake used molasses instead of chocolate. However, chocolate powder and then baking chocolate were found to be a more effective way of creating dark cake, and the rich flavor was an effective contrast to the light flavor of angel's food. The first recipe for devil's food cake was printed in 1902, but there is evidence from some food writing of the era that it had been around in the late 19th century.

Only later came red velvet. The recipe was at first very similar to devil's food, and was even sometimes called "red devil" cake. By this time, devil's food was being made with non-reactive chocolate, so it had less of that mahogany color. Early red velvet cake recipes still used cocoa powder, and the use of the Southern staple buttermilk made it more acidic, creating a more intense red color. During World War 2, when cocoa was scarce, bakers turned to artificial food dyes or beet juice, which finally gave red velvet its signature intense color. But both red velvet and devil's food owe their existence to the original mahogany cakes.