Beetroot Cake

It's a measure of changing tastes that it's almost impossible to find a reliable recipe for a simple beetroot cake; the first 16 pages of Google search  results showed almost exclusively chocolate and beetroot cake recipes, and most of those without chocolate were paleo or so-called  'healthy'! I knew Nigel Slater had a recipe, but didn't want that one. In the end I searched through my store of pages torn from food magazines to go back to Nigella Lawson's recipe for 'Ruby Red Loaf Cake' and adapted it to suit the ingredients I wanted to use; the biggest adaptation, and worry about how well it would work, was using cooked beetroot instead of raw.

The recipe was published in Sainsbury's magazine in 2001, but I have no idea which book it was published in. My recollection of it was that the cake batter stayed pink when it baked, but I didn't manage to achieve that this time - possibly because I cut out the juice of half a lemon, or because I used already cooked beet rather than raw. I really should do some scientific research into this, to find out what keeps the colour in the beet as it cooks - a pink cake is so much more attractive!

Ingredients
200g cooked beetroot
250g butter at room temperature
200g light brown sugar
the zest of an orange, finely grated
3 large eggs
150g dried fruit (I used 40g dried sour cherries cut in half, 60g dried cranberries and 50g sultanas)
1 teaspoon cinnamon or mixed spice
150g SR flour
150g spelt flour
60 mls milk, to mix, plus more if necessary

50g icing sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
the liquid from the drained beetroot - see method

Method
Finely grate the beetroot and leave in a sieve over a bowl for 30 minutes, to allow excess liquid to drain off. Reserve this liquid if you want to frost the cake.
Pre-heat the oven to 180C and prepare a deep 8" square cake tin.
Beat the butter sugar and orange zest together until light and fluffy, then slowly beat in the eggs, one at a time, with a tablespoon of the flour each time.
Fold in the dried fruit, grated beetroot and spice, followed by half the flour, the milk, then the rest of the flour. If necessary add a little more milk to give a soft dropping consistency.
Transfer the batter to the cake tin and spread evenly. Bake for 45-50 minutes, until a test probe comes out cleanly.
Cool in the tin, on a wire rack, for at least 30 minutes before taking the cake out of the tin.

If desired, frost the cold cake using the sifted icing sugar mixed with the lemon juice and enough of the drained-off beet liquid to give a deep pink colour. I put the glacé icing into a plastic bag and snipped off the corner so that I could drizzle just a little icing over the cake.

This was a pleasant cake, very similar to a carrot cake. The beetroot couldn't be tasted, so the flavour was from the orange zest, spice and dried fruit. I'd have been happier with the cake if the beetroot had been more visible, but even the flecks of grated beet seemed to lose the pink colour during baking.

Beetroot and Chilli Brownies

I was shown this gluten-free brownie recipe a while back, and knew straight away that I wanted to make it. Flour is replaced with ground almonds in this recipe, and I find this type of gluten-free baking often works better for me than substituting gluten-free flour into my usual recipes. Using puréed cooked beetroot also means that the recipe can get away with using less butter whilst still remaining moist. Beetroot is naturally sweet too, so the added sugar can also be reduced slightly.

Once I'd made the brownies, I was surprised by how moist they were, but it was only some time later that I realised that I might have used too much beetroot. I just picked up a supermarket pack, assuming it was the right size, but it could have been up to double the amount I actually needed. I can't remember where I bought it, as it could have been any of the 3 supermarkets I regularly use, so can't easily check.

Apart from the excessive moistness these brownies were good to eat. The amount of cayenne pepper used was just enough to leave a warm after-taste in the mouth, without being overwhelming. Because the beetroot was puréed, it wasn't noticeable as an ingredient, either in the flavour or texture, but adding it does make one feel less guilty when eating a piece! The overall texture was a bit lighter than I like in a brownie - I prefer a dense chewy texture - but I'm happy to have another successful gluten-free recipe to add to my collection.

This month the Tea Time Treats challenge is to use vegetables when cooking for the tea table. Brownies are a relatively modern treat, but I suspect that nowadays  most people would expect one to turn up in the cake selection at tea time, so I'm happy to be able to submit this entry. Karen of Lavender and Lovage alternates hosting this challenge with Jane of The Hedge Combers, and as this month's host, will post a round-up of entries at the end of the month.

Cherries, Berries and Beetroot Cake

This could almost have been a Random Recipe - I'd love to enter Dom's monthly challenge, but I couldn't do it honestly and still stick with the baking theme of the blog. I'd have to tidy rearrange my bookshelves to put all the baking books in one place first. The randomness comes from the fact that I wasn't looking for a cake recipe - I picked up Dan Lepard's Short and Sweet to check the recipe for Lemon and Almond buns, and it fell open at the page for Cherry Beet Cake (here's the same recipe from the Guardian).

I had half a pack of beetroot left over from the recent chocolate beetroot cake, and had recently stocked up with a pack of dried Berries and Cherries, and  Bonne Maman Berries and Cherries jam. They sounded like a good enough substitute for sour cherries and cherry jam, to me. No fresh cream for the filling, but it looked the sort of sturdy cake which would cope with a cream cheese frosting used as a filling.

There were no problems with the recipe, except that I thought there was far too much streusel topping, and only used about half of it, which gave an even coating on the top of one layer - any more and I don't think it would have stuck in place during baking.

The batter was a lovely pink colour after mixing, and I although was a little disappointed that it turned brown when cooked, there were still pink flecks of grated beetroot visible. This is how I like to see a beetroot cake - the beet itself playing a visible part in the proceedings, rather than hidden behind chocolate!

This was a solid, quite dry cake, and definitley needed the jam and cream cheese  filling. I used cooked beetrrot, and it might be that raw beetroot would make a moister cake. The flavour of the spices were predominant - the family thought it was a very Christmassy cake, and Hubs said it tasted like mince pies! The jam and the lemon in the cream cheese filling added a zing and a touch of  freshness to the flavour.

The recipe for the cream cheese frosting was also from Short and Sweet - I made a half quantity with 200g cream cheese, 100g unsalted butter, 100g icing sugar, the grated zest of half a small lemon and a teaspoon of lemon juice. The recipe advised to beat half the cream cheese with the other ingredients first, then beat in the rest of the cream cheese. I don't know if it was the addition of the lemon, or the proportions of cheese, butter and sugar, but this was one of the best cream cheese frostings I've ever made. It stayed thick and even set to hold it's shape - the photo shows an extra helping of the frosting beside the cake (in case I hadn't put enough in as filling, you understand!)

Beetroot and Chocolate Cake

This is another Good Food recipe, this time one recommended by Foodycat (or should that be Mr Foodycat?).  It has the features I need in a chocolate cake - dark, moist and low in saturated fat. It wasn't quite as easy for me as the 'blitz and bake' technique described in the recipe, as I don't have a large food processor, but it was fairly simple to make in a bowl with a hand-held electric mixer, once the beetroot was puréed in my mini-chopper.

Or, it should have been fairly simple! I had carefully lined my deep loaf tin and scraped all the batter in; the cake had even been in the oven 5 minutes before I realised I'd forgotten to add the baking powder! My language would have disgraced a gang of navvies! Out the tin came from the oven. the batter was scraped back into the mixing bowl, and the baking powder was stirred in as quickly and thoroughly as possible. By now, the lining paper and the baking tin were a real mess, and the only option was to quickly line an alternative loaf tin. This was much longer and shallower than the one I intended to use, and I think in the end this resulted in the cake being a little over-cooked, as I didn't take the shape into account, and reduce the cooking time. But at least it rose!

I took note of some of the comments saying how bitter the cake was, so used milk chocolate chunks to add to the cake, as the only alternative I had available was quite strong and dark.

I have tried another recipe using beetroot in a chocolate cake - it was raw beetroot in that recipe - and once again I found that I didn't notice any flavour from the beetroot at all. Puréeing cooked beetroot meant that there wasn't even the texture of grated vegetable in the cake, as there was in the other cake. This cake wasn't quite as rich, but it was much more economical than the first recipe I tried. This is quite a good chocolate cake, but I prefer beetroot cakes to have more evidence of the beetroort - even if it means leaving out the chocolate!  Here, the beetroot seems an unnecessary gimmick, although I guess it helps retain moisture and adds to the sweetness in a natural way.

One point which I thought quite important - with some oil based cakes there's a certain blandness which tells you the cake is made with oil rather than butter, but that wasn't noticeable here.

Savoury Goat Cheese and Chocolate Canapés - We Should Cocoa

This month's We Should Cocoa challenge has been just that - a real challenge, requiring several days of thought. Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog, who is a joint host with Chele from Chocolate Teapot, asked us to make something savoury and vegetarian for the February challenge - and chose the month with the fewest days to give us the hardest challenge, too! For those still unfamiliar with We Should Cocoa, each month we are asked to make something containing chocolate using the special nominated ingredient or method. The full rules can be found here on Choclette's blog.

My only previous experience of using chocolate in savoury cooking has been to add a few squares of dark chocolate to a chilli con carne. Although I could have taken the easy way out and done the same with a vegetarian chilli, I wanted to get into the spirit of the challenge and to make something original, which fitted the main theme of this blog - baking.

I decided to use chocolate pastry, and after a lot of thought, was convinced that nothing large scale was going to work here - small is beautiful, especially if the flavours don't quite work, which is always a worry when breaking new ground. Something which could go on a canapé tray and be eaten in one mouthful was the way to go - all the flavours at once, and no need to eat any more if it didn't suit your taste!

The first task was to think of savoury flavours which went well together, and also which might work with chocolate. Beetroot was an obvious choice as it is quite a sweet vegetable and is often used with chocolate in cakes and brownies. Goat cheese and beetroot are a good savoury pairing, and so is beetroot and horseradish. Right up until the moment I started to mix the filling, I intended to use goat cheese, beetroot and horseradish together but at the last moment I remembered a bar of chocolate containing pink peppercorns which we ate recently, and how deliciously spicy it was. The crunch of the pepper gave an extra textural contrast too. Out went the horseradish and in came a few coarsely crushed pink peppercorns.

There isn't really a recipe for what I did - but here's an outline of how these Goat Cheese and Chocolate Canapés were put together.

The pastry was standard shortcrust, made with plain flour and butter containing sea-salt crystals. I added 1 tablespoon of cocoa to 100g flour and 50g butter, and a few grindings of black pepper to make the pastry really savoury. I don't have any mini-tart moulds, but I do have some speciality Czech moulds, designed for sweet making. They look like little spoons, so I cut out circles of pastry, fitted each circle between two greased moulds, to prevent the pastry rising when cooked, and trimmed the pastry to the shape of the mould. These were then baked at 200C for 15 minutes. Luckily the moulds slipped away from the pastry quite easily.

The filling was an equal quantity of soft goat cheese and full fat cream cheese (about 30g of each for the 8 canapés I made), mixed with a half-teaspoon of coarsely crushed pink peppercorns. A small ball of this mixture was put into each pastry spoon - I think it would look very attractive if it was piped in, but I wasn't working with large enough quantities. The cheese was topped with a cube of cooked beetroot, a tiny parsley leaf and a grating of 100% cacao (Willie's Peruvian Black).

To be honest, the chocolate wasn't a predominant flavour, but I'm not sure the canapé would have been very pleasant if it had tasted strongly of chocolate. All the flavours blended together really well, with the spiciness of the peppercorns leaving the strongest impression after the mouthful was chewed and swallowed. The sweetness of the beetroot was also a major taste factor, although it didn't hide the fact that this was a savoury morsel.

This was an interesting challenge, but I don't think savoury chocolate recipes will feature regularly on my baking itinerary, unless someone else taking part comes up with something irresistible. I'm really looking forward to seeing the round-up for this challenge! Karen at Lavender and Lovage also used goat cheese and beetroot in her entry, and although I had already made my decision to use them, it was good to have it confirmed that these two ingredients would work well with chocolate!

Chocolate Beetroot Cake

Having maintained for a long time that I couldn't see the point of adding beetroot to a chocolate cake, my curiosity finally overcame my reticence and I decided to try a recipe.


The first problem was finding a reliable recipe; there are so many variations between those online - is it best to add cocoa or drinking chocolate, cooked or raw beetroot? Should I choose a recipe which also added melted plain chocolate; if so, how much? Prompted by a thread on the BBC Food Messageboards, I decided that I needed a recipe which used cocoa and chocolate together for the best possible flavour. Using raw beetroot seemed more convenient - why add an extra time consuming process? Eventually I settled on this recipe from Delicious magazine, mainly because it added a lot of chocolate and a large quantity of beetroot, so would be a good test of it's effects, but I took a tip from a similar recipe and used 80g flour and 25g cocoa instead of 100g flour. For my own convenience I used an 8" square tin rather than the 9" diameter round tin suggested in the recipe.

The recipe worked very well; I had no problems and the cake baked in the specified time.


Once it was cold, I added my own fudge frosting recipe, as I didn't have any sour cream. This was: 50g plain chocolate, 225g icing sugar, 50g butter and 3 tablespoons of milk melted and combined to a smooth mixture in a saucepan. The frosting is beaten frequently as it cools and thickens, until it is a spreadable texture, then put on top of the cake, spread to the edges and swirled with a knife blade to give an attractive finish - much easier than trying to get a smooth finish!


The cake was a revelation to me - the texture was rich and moist without being too dense and the flavour was deep and chocolatey (not surprising with 250g chocolate in it) but not oversweet. I couldn't taste the beetroot at all, although the occasional change in texture reminded me that there was grated vegetable in there!

I guess the conclusion for me is that I wouldn't buy beetroot especially to make a chocolate cake, but when there's a summer glut to be used, it does make a well-textured, tasty cake.