Blue Velvet Cake Mix

Blue velvet cake is red velvet cake with the colouring changed, and it belongs to American baking. The flavour is identical: a light vanilla cake with a small amount of cocoa, made distinctive by the reaction between buttermilk, vinegar and cocoa powder. That reaction is the whole idea behind velvet cakes. The acid in buttermilk and vinegar softens the proteins in cake flour, producing a finer, smoother crumb than an ordinary sponge, and the name describes that texture rather than any ingredient. Red velvet is the original; blue is a modern variation achieved with royal blue food colouring and a small drop of violet, the violet being what stops the cake turning turquoise. Its main contemporary use is the gender reveal party, an American social convention of the last two decades, where a blue cake announces a boy and a pink one a girl. There is nothing African about any of this, and the source makes no such claim. It sits in Worldwide Recipes under American, with its URL unchanged. Note also that this is a **cake mix** rather than a finished cake: it is a dry mix intended for storage, with the wet ingredients added later.