Name: First Lady Michelle Obama's Favorite Red Velvet Cake
Prep time: 15 min
Total time: 1 h 15 min
Yield: 1
Ingredients: 1 1/2 c. granulated sugar; 6 oz. unsalted butter; 2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour; 2 tsp. baking soda; 1 c. buttermilk; 1 tbsp. pure vanilla extract; 4 large eggs; 1/2 tsp. kosher salt; 2 tbsp. cocoa powder; 2 oz. red food coloring; 2 oz. hot water; 1 tsp. vinegar; 8 oz. cream cheese; 2 oz. unsalted butter, softened; 8 oz. confectioners sugar; 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

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- Hi, my name is Bill Yosses and I was lucky enough to be the pastry chef for two presidents; George W. Bush and Barack Obama. I'm going to be making one of Mrs. Obama's favorite cake The red velvet cake. (soft music) You may have heard that most of the desserts at the white house during the Obama years were pies, but this is an exception. Red velvet cake was popular and often served at birthday parties. As so often, we start with creaming the butter. So take soft butter and mix it with the sugar. Here we begin to introduce air (air whooshing) into the butter process. That's going to begin to build up. In the meantime, I'm going to sift my dry ingredients. (soft music) Now that the butter is starting to fluff up nice and fluffy, you can see the difference already. That's why they call it blanching the butter. It's starting to get wider and wider as the air is introduced inside. And at this part, it really takes two people. So I'm going to introduce John. He's going to slowly sift in the flour as I add the liquid ingredients. We're going to alternate liquids and dries. So it all comes together into a smooth mass. (soft music) I think one of the misconceptions about Mrs Obama's healthy food initiative, Let's Move, was that she might be anti desserts in some way. That was not true. Mrs. Obama never asked me to make Spock cuisine or low calorie desserts or not use butter or sugar but the way she saw it was that desserts should be not as frequent as it can be. So frequency reduced and portion size reduced. But if we were going to make a dessert, whether it was to be served to the family or to guests, it should be very good made from great ingredients and great technique. That way a person is satisfied with a smaller amount. So we always made the best desserts possible. We used the best ingredients possible. There's probably no such thing as a healthy dessert in fact, but I believe there a healthy lifestyle that includes desserts. (soft music) Bakes for 20 minutes, at 350. One of the most powerful things I saw happen at the white house was Mrs. Obama's Let's Move program. She invited chefs from all over the United States to come to the White House for a conference. And this was somewhat hastily put together with about two weeks notice. Chefs from all over America came. On their own dime, two weeks they had, and 700 people showed up on the South Lawn of the White House. So Mrs. Obama gave a speech asking chefs and our profession to help with the childhood obesity epidemic with just generally healthier foods and avoiding the kind of bad food habits that have been building up in our country. It was an impassioned speech and really everyone signed on to agree to do whatever they could to talk to their customers, to their families, friends. And one of the important points was to try to introduce healthier foods into school lunches. A program which continues to this day and which all over the country communities are facing and coming together in order to feed their kids a better style of food, better diets, and to reverse the negative aspects of fast food and unhealthy eating. To do this, she then introduced a garden onto the South Lawn of the White House, which is not as easy as it sounds. It's a very compact area. It's only 18 acres on all of the grounds, but finally a perfect area was found close to the fence on the South Lawn. And we planted a garden in full view with the full sun and 1400 square feet of vegetables, fruits, there was a fig tree, every vegetable you could imagine, eggplant, tomatoes, corn you name it, beans, all kinds of beans and an herb garden. That became a symbol, I think across the country for improving the way we eat. And it launched a huge program of planting gardens in people's backyards. So there were reports of garden supplies and seeds and composite sales really going through the roof. It was a great effort and it was something I'm proud to be part of something that I continued to do to this day. I go to schools and talk to kids about cooking, about baking and about their health. This classic American dessert the red velvet cake is usually and best decorated with the cream cheese frosting. So we'll start out by creaming our butter, soft butter that's been left out. We'll just use part of the sugar to really get the butter into a creamy state. Once we get the butter creamy, which means no lumps we'll start to add our cream cheese. This process similar to making the cake with whipped butter is we're whipping the cream cheese like we whip the butter and the sugar acts as those little knives which are cutting into the cream cheese and introducing air. So it becomes lighter and fluffier as we go along. People often ask me the question, did in the Obama White House, did they sneak snacks or did they follow the healthy cuisine all the time? And the answer is they walked the walk, talked the talk and walked the walk. Yes, everything was healthy from day one. Mrs. Obama talks about this in her book, "Becoming" where during the campaign, it was very difficult to keep a regular schedule, to have regular meals. Sometimes there had to be like last minute arrangements. So she was very concerned about that for herself and for the children. So once things settled down and they moved into the White House, it was like the first week that Mrs. Obama called all the chefs into the meeting and said she wanted this to be a very healthy time for ourselves and for the kids. And also asked for our help in making this sort of a program that could be sort of spread out as an educational program for families and kids across the country. And that became known as Let's Move, became known as the school lunch program and efforts to just improve the way people thought about food and especially about kids and what they're eating in schools in particular. So yes, they walked the walk. There were no snacks. There were no like plates of cookies left around. If there were guests, yes, there were sometimes buffet of desserts but for the family themselves, breakfast, lunch, dinner, healthy and healthy and happy. (soft music) So you see how how much higher this frosting has come up in the bowl. We started out way down here and now it's tripled in volume. All that air is being encapsulated inside the frosting. Once we have our red velvet cake baked we're going to cut this cake in half and trim off the sides. We're going to assemble the cake starting out with this piece. I just use the pastry bag for this process a little easier to control. So it doesn't get all over you. We're going to build this layer up with the cream cheese frosting put the second layer on top, cover that. (soft music) And then we're going to do the sides as we build the cake. This cake was often made for a very special family occasions, birthdays in particular for the girls, Sasha and Malia. I have such fond memories of them and seeing pictures of them. They often would accompany their parents on travels around the world. One particular of Sasha in the Kremlin walking next to these Russian generals with the high hats. And she's wearing a trench coat, sort of like a little small mini detective walking down the hallways of the Kremlin, incredible shot, looking quite confident I have to say. And of course, wonderful pictures of them at Buckingham palace and being received by Queen Elizabeth. (soft music) The Obama's really made us feel part of their family. And when I left, they gave me a gift. The gift that they gave me was a letter that Queen Elizabeth had given to president Eisenhower after one of his visits to Buckingham palace. And during that visit, President Eisenhower had complimented the queen on the scones served at Buckingham palace. And so she had the recipe typed out and sent to him with a little note saying, thank you for complimenting our scones. Here's the recipe. This is Obama gave me that letter as a parting gift. So this is that letter typed in that wonderful Remington typewriter. You can see the date down here is 1960 enough for 16 people. So I was very moved by this gift. I mean, for a pastry chef, what an honor to receive this piece of history! But I was a little taken aback and I said, this is a historical document. I mean, can I really have that? Can I have this gift? And she said, Bill, it's all gonna be. (soft music) And that's the famous red velvet cake. It was a very popular item at birthday parties during the Obama administration, it showed up on the Christmas buffet and now we can enjoy it here. I hope you guys are going to help me eat it. (soft music)

Bill Yosses was the personal pastry chef to President George W. Bush, First Lady Laura Bush, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and all the guests that entered the White House for eight years.

In this limited series, Chef Yosses will walk you through the presidential families' favorite recipes...while spilling all the most glorious presidential tea. In our fourth episode, Bill shows us how to make Michelle Obama's favorite Red Velvet Cake—a staple of Obama family birthdays. Chef Yosses also gets into *those* rumors about Michelle requesting "spa desserts" and what the relationship was truly like between the two.

First Lady Michelle Obama's Favorite Red Velvet Cake

Ingredients

For cake:

For frosting:

Directions

For frosting and assembly:

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