A new take on red velvet

As you know, yesterday was my birthday and I made my own cake. Can you guess which cake I had last year? If you guessed the one on the left, you are correct. I can't blame my husband and kids. They get an A for effort for trying to make me a nice cake. I guess they weren't aware that the cake has to cool before you frost it. And also, 1 and 3 year-olds are not good at frosting cakes, or putting candles on, for that matter. (Notice the one upside down candle.) So this year, I was happy to make my own cake, especially because it meant I could experiment with ingredients. I made a red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting and strawberry jam filling. I had read on the internet, and you know the internet does not lie, that red amaranth used to be used as a dye to color things red. I had some extra amaranth sitting in my fridge and thought it would be a great experiment to see if it really worked. I made the cake as usual, with the exception of adding 1 cup of white wheat flour and blending the amaranth with the milk and vanilla in a blender. It ended up being about a cup of leaves and I don't think it was quite enough. As you can see, the cake was more of a brown velvet cake.

It tasted like a normal red velvet cake, so we weren't disappointed flavor wise. And now I know what it looks like with out dye! I would like to try it again sometime, using more leaves, or maybe including more of the stems to see if I can get the red color without artificial dyes. Have you heard of any way to do this?