Hi! I'm new to this site, and I noticed that a lot of people had some very helpful suggestions in this thread. My quandry is that I am on a quest to make a red velvet cake without any food coloring, or beets. I did try doing it with the beets before, and I found that the recipe I used did two things: 1. they were more purplish than red (maybe because I used dutch processed cocoa), and 2. they had a rather earthy taste to them. Not that that was terrible, and my friends liked it, but I really wanted it to have a sweeter taste. So, I thought that possibly using either strawberries, or raspberries would be a better alternative. Any suggestions?