Red Velvet Cake for Christmas Round 2

When my family went to my cousin's for Christmas Round 2 in Kingston, AR, my cousin Melissa asked me to bake a red velvet cake to bring for dessert - so of course, I obliged! Now, I have a bit of a confession to make: I use box mix for most of my cakes... I said it. But! For my red velvet cake, I do make my own cream cheese frosting and I added chocolate chips this time to the cake batter for a new touch. So the recipe here is a little bit of a let down, I'm afraid, haha. But basically I just followed the directions on the back of the box and added a cup of chocolate chips to the batter. Here's the trick though - apparently you need to roll the chocolate chips in the dry batter first to keep them from sinking to the bottom... Oops, lol. Well, I will do that from now on, but this time I hadn't learned this trick yet, so the chips did indeed all sink to the bottom, haha. However, since I made the cake in three circle pans (which means that I doubled the recipe and used two boxes of mix), the chocolate chips were layered too! So it worked out. But like I said, I used two boxes because I don't think two layer cakes have enough height to look as fancy as I want them to. :o) However, four layers is too much... So I use the other fourth of the cake mix to make a pan of 12 cupcakes too. Another tip: it's VERY important to grease the pan AND flour it - or you can use the baker's spray that has flour built in, but make sure it has the flour. Otherwise, your cake won't come out of the pan. It seems pretty elementary, but I have definitely made this mistake before, so I'd rather someone read this again than forget. So, bake the cakes, let them cool for like 15 minutes in the pan and then turn them upside down on a cooling rack and them let them cool completely! While they are cooling, I make the frosting. It's super easy - use one box of cream cheese, one stick of butter, one box of powdered sugar, and a splash of vanilla. I usually wind up making another batch to be able to fully frost the cake and the cupcakes, but I do them one at a time - and you will likely have leftover frosting if you make two full batches. After the cakes have cooled, depending on how evenly they baked, sometimes they need trimming so that the cake won't have a hump on top. To keep the cake level, you can alternate laying them upside down and right side up with the first layer facing down, the middle layer face up, and then the top layer face down. The frosting will set off the imbalance between the second and top layers. I like to be pretty generous with my icing in between the layers, and then on top too. I have found that it is easiest to use a spatula to frost the cake. Then you are done! Well, you can garnish the cake with pecans, cake crumbles from any trimming, and/or chocolate chips. If I use pecans on the cake, I make sure to leave some of the cupcakes without them so as to accommodate anyone who is either allergic or just doesn't like them. Anyhow, here are my pictures!

Before:

After:

I guess it was a hit! :o)