Preheat your oven to 160C Fan / 180C and grease and line x3 20cm circular baking tins.

Beat together caster sugar and butter in a bowl under combined, light and fluffy.

Add in your eggs one at a time, beating in between each one briefly so just combined.

Follow this by adding your cocoa powder (ensure it's sifted or else it will go lumpy). Mix it in.

Next add your vanilla and red food paste. Firstly get a small bowl and combine the vanilla and red food paste together. Add it and mix until fully combined.

Measure out your flour and mix in your xanthan gum.

Add in your flour and buttermilk gradually. Start with half your flour and then half your buttermilk. Mix it together thoroughly, but briefly, before adding in your second half of flour and then your buttermilk. Make sure you don't mix this too much either. Just enough to ensure the wet and dry mixtures are fully combined.

Mix together your bicarbonate of soda and vinegar and add to the cake mix immediately - don't over mix.

Spoon / pour your mixture equally into the three tins and place in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes. I don't have a big enough oven to equally bake all 3 at once, so I do two and then do the third one afterwards. Check with a skewer that the cakes are fully cooked.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool initially in the tin (about 10-15 minutes) before finishing the cooling on a cooling rack.

For your cream cheese frosting get your softened butter and cream cheese into a stand mixer and mix together on a medium speed for about a minute until combined.

Next add in your icing sugar. There is a lot of icing sugar so add this in 3 to 4 stages, mixing until combined between each addition. Also, always start your mixer very slow to ensure the icing doesn't go everywhere! Then your icing should be done - it should be the right consistency and a lovely pale white colour.

To construct the cake, start by trimming the tops of each sponge using a sharp knife. Aim to remove the most risen part of each sponge to make them all as flat as possible. Keep the trimmings for later.

Spread icing between each sponge layer as you build the cake up. It's up to you how you finish the cake from this point onwards. You can either just ice the top and keep it simple, or if you want to make it look like how I did in the photos, this next step is for you!

To ice the cake like I did in the photos, I'd recommend watching this video or scroll up until you see the question 'How do I ice my red velvet cake like yours?' for text instructions. This will will let you know how to do a crumb coat and use a plastic icing scraper for the perfect finish.

Finish the cake by crumbing the red velvet cake trimmings on top.

Enjoy!