Red velvet cake is a mixture of both chocolate and vanilla cake, with some extra added ingredients. There's not enough cocoa powder in this cake for it to be considered chocolate. We're only using 2-3 tablespoons at the most. But because there's chocolate in the cake, it's not a true vanilla cake, either. Plus the addition of buttermilk gives it a different flavor altogether. Which puts red velvet into a category of its own.