Red Velvet Recipes for Valentine's Day

Woo your sweetheart with these red velvet crackle cookies. Photo by Erin Scott.

Red velvet cake never goes out of style in the South. The classic version is chocolate-flavored, mahogany-colored and slathered with a sweet, cream cheese frosting. Originally the redish color was attributed to bakers using non-Dutched (anthocyanin-rich) cocoa in the recipe. Today, most people get away with using red food coloring or beet juice to get that rosy hue.

For Valentine's Day, mix up tradition with one of these modern recipes: red velvet crackle cookies, red (wine) velvet cake or red velvet marble cake. We've also thrown in a great recipe for cream cheese frosting and dark chocolate-hazelnut fudge, just in case you want to intensify the aphrodisiac-power of chocolate even more.