Every spring, this editor gets the itch to throw a party to banish the winter blues. And for the first time in nearly a decade, I’m acting on that urge and hosting some good friends tonight in my humble Brooklyn firetrap.

On the modest dinner menu, you will find both meat and vegetarian chili, cornbread, and for dessert (my favorite part of every meal), cupcakes—chocolate w/chocolate buttercream icing, vanilla w/vanilla buttercream icing, and by special request, red velvet w/cream cheese icing. For the first two varieties, I got recipes from my baking genius of a mother, who, alas, doesn’t know diddly about red velvet (she’s a damn Yankee, after all).

For that Southern delicacy, I wanted the best of the best, and the web’s many ardent cupcake bloggers all agree that Sylvia Woods of Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem blows the door off the oven with her concoction. One “Sweet Monkey Cakes” on the Cooks’ Illustrated message board swears by it, but with two minor changes (more cocoa and buttermilk!).

Last night, I tried Sweet Monkey Cake’s take, which is based on Woods’s recipe from Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook (Morrow, 1999), and I’m happy to say I got the most delectable red gems, moist with just the right amount of smoky cocoa taste. Mine aren’t probably going to look as professional as the one pictured below when they’re frosted later today, but they’re going to go down like butter—two sticks, to be exact.