Honey Breakfast Fruit Cake

 - from a recipe by Harry Eastwood.

This cake was made specifically for the AlphaBakes challenge, where this month's randomly chosen letter is H.

My baking books were surprisingly short of recipes containing ingredients beginning with H - hazelnuts featured heavily, but I've used them a lot lately, and wanted to avoid them if possible. Honey was the only other frequently used ingredient, so I set myself the task of finding a recipe for a fruit cake sweetened only by honey.  So many recipes are called 'honey (something or other)', only to feature a tablespoon or two of honey, supposedly added for flavour, in addition to the usual high amount of sugar found in most cakes and biscuits.

I'm not going down the route of claiming that a cake sweetened with honey is any healthier than a cake sweetened by standard sugar (they are both types of carbohydrates not really needed for nutrition), but I do think that if you are using honey for it's flavour, you need a fair amount of it in a cake!

However, Harry Eastwood's baking recipes (ooooh! an extra H there!) are special for being a little bit healthier than most. She uses added vegetables a lot, and tries to cut down on the amount of sugar and fat in her recipes. This cake, called a Honey Breakfast Fruit Cake, uses finely grated butternut squash to replace much of the fat  - the only fat comes from nuts and eggs - and the squash also has a natural sweetness which means less needs to be added in the form of honey. The cake batter is made from half flour and half ground almonds and is packed with dried fruit and chopped nuts. In fact, for the size of cake made, it's really fruit and nuts held together with a little cake batter!

I followed the basic recipe, but as I'm trying to finish some of the half-used packets of dried fruits and nuts in the storecupboard, I altered what I used from what was suggested in the recipe. Instead of raisins and cranberries, I used sultanas, cranberries and sour cherries, and instead of chopped almonds I used a mixture of almonds, walnuts, macadamia nuts and peanuts. I also sprinkled some flaked almonds on top of the cake before baking.

This was a really delicious cake; the almond flavour was predominant, as you'd expect with the use of almond extract, but the lemon zest and the honey both made a noticeable contribution. Obviously, the cake will vary in flavour depending on what type of honey is used - I used a Fairtrade Guatemalan honey which wasn't produced from any specific flowers, and was just a generic 'honey' flavour.

The big surprise was that the absence of fat wasn't noticed, nor was the addition of  quite a large amount of grated butternut squash. The recipe stated to grate the squash finely, so I used a finer grater than I would have used if grating carrots for a carrot cake, and this made the vegetable vanish into the cake batter, only adding moisture to the texture.

I'm not sure this would convince me that it's good to eat cake for breakfast, but it is certainly a cake that's good to eat, and will go on my list of things worth repeating.

AlphaBakes (rules here) is a blogging challenge hosted on alternate months by Ros from The More Than Occasional Baker and Caroline from Caroline Makes. This month's randomly chosen letter H was picked by Ros, who will post a roundup of entries at the end of the month.

Sweet Potato and White Chocolate Cake

 I don't know if Jibber Jabber, the host of this month's We Should Cocoa challenge had a premonition of what was to come on Week 8 of The Great British Bake Off, but after a week of magnificent 3-D vegetable cakes which were also non-dairy, I'm sure that anything containing vegetables that I can bake will be an anti-climax. Fortunately I don't have to make a non-dairy cake or turn it into a novelty cake, and even more fortunately, I must include chocolate in some form to take part in We Should Cocoa. I've gone for substance over style (unlike Ruth) but this cake really was a little too substantial. I could be like Christine, and claim that the 'bread-pudding like' texture was intentional, but I really don't think that's how it should have been.

I scoured the internet for recipes which went beyond the usual carrots, courgettes or beetroot and in the end decided to use sweet potato. I also decided to use white chocolate, as most dark chocolate vegetable cakes I've tried lose the vegetables under the intensity of the chocolate flavour. I really wanted to get the full effect from the sweet potato. I used this recipe from The Good Food Channel, adding the zest of an orange, as suggested in the 'Tips' part of the recipe.

I know I've said in the past that I was never again going to make a recipe which melted white chocolate, but here the chocolate was melted with the oil, so what could go wrong? It didn't go drastically wrong, but the white chocolate still didn't melt easily and I really had to work hard to amalgamate it with the oil. The only other change I made was to finely grate the sweet potato, as I don't have a food processor which would reduce raw vegetables to a purée

The cake rose well in the oven and I tested it with a heat sensitive probe at the end of cooking time, and it appeared cooked. However, once out of the oven it collapsed quite a bit, to the extent that the sides of the cake collapsed inwards too. I'm not sure if it was undercooked or if there was too much liquid or raising agent, or whether it was just the addition of the chocolate, but the collapse made the cooled cake quite dense and pudding-y. Luckily, the flavour was excellent, although very sweet for our taste, so after the first taste I added a drizzle of 85% chocolate over the top of the cake. The flavour was predominantly of the orange zest; as usual the white chocolate added vanilla notes and the sweet potato seemed to add colour and texture rather than much flavour.

I'm quite disappointed that the vegetable cakes I've made recently have been heavy. I use a carrot cake recipe which always produces a light cake, so perhaps I should just vary the vegetables in that, rather than trying to find different recipes.

We Should Cocoa was started by Chele from Chocolate Teapot and Choclette from Chocolate Log Blog, and the rules can be found here. This month, the theme of pairing chocolate with vegetables was chosen by guest host, Jibber Jabber, who is accepting entries by Linky this month, and will do the usual round up at the end of the month.

Dan Lepard's Chocolate Passion Cake

If. like me, you haven't had any really good experiences with Vegan cakes, or you are just prejudiced against them for some reason, then I urge you to give Dan Lepard's recipe  for Chocolate Passion Cake a try. It's certainly made me adjust my ideas about baking cakes without eggs; until now I haven't baked anything that I'd really want to make again, and at least one attempt at a  vegan chocolate cake has ended in the bin, with no-one wanting to eat it.

Here, the addition of the other ingredients - date purée, carrots, nuts and spices - hides the blandness that is present in a lot of cakes made using neither eggs nor butter. Both the texture and the flavour is much improved - I would willingly put this cake up against a conventional carrot cake and defy anyone to notice that it was a vegan version!

This is a cake which I would happily make again, even if I didn't need a vegan cake (I didn't need one this time - I was just browsing Dan's book, Short and Sweet, for a cake recipe with either oil, or only a small amount of butter). It was light and moist and packed with a whole bunch of flavours - nuts and spices as well as chocolate. If I have one criticism it's that it's a little on the delicate side - it has a tendency to crumble rather than slice neatly. In addition, I wasn't completely happy with the spice flavour; although it wasn't bad, I think it might be better to use just cinnamon, rather than the stipulated mix of ginger and mixed spice.

Even CT, who has always maintained that he didn't like carrot cake, was happy to eat this! I thought about not telling him there were carrots there, as I had grated them finely, and they couldn't be seen in the dark coloured crumb, but I owned up before he ate any. His acceptance made me wonder if I ought to tell him about the beetroot in the chocolate cake a few weeks ago, which he ate quite happily, if unknowingly, even though he refused to try the Cherries, Berries and  Beetroot cake I made a few days later, because I had to tell him what the pink flecks were!

I didn't change anything in the cake recipe, but I did make a different frosting - my usual fudge frosting (see this recipe) which has less sugar than glacé icing. As I don't have a large food processor, I used a stick blender to purée the dates and blend in the oil and vinegar to make an emulsion. This appears to have been an acceptable way of doing things. I chopped the dates and nuts in a mini processor, but I processed the nuts for slightly too long - I should have stopped while the pieces were a bit larger. The recipe appears complicated on first reading, but the cake was really quick to put together and baked quite fast too.

Apologies for the picture quality - I had the usual problems with making brown cakes look attractive!

Dan Lepard's Ginger Root Cake

CT has claimed not to like carrot cake from childhood, but FB loves it. Whenever I baked a carrot cake for her, CT steadfastly refused to eat any - he's not one to let his prejudices go easily. So it was with a little trepidation that I decided to bake this cake; I guess I hoped that the ginger flavour and dark colour of the batter would at least hide the vegetable until CT had tasted it without knowing what was there. That idea would have worked better if I hadn't teased him about a secret ingredient which I would reveal after he had tasted it - his first guess, even before tasting, was 'some sort of vegetable' so I had to tell him it contained parsnips. To his credit, as he doesn't even eat parsnips as a vegetable, he tried the cake and fortunately he liked it!

As I expected, this was a ginger cake with added root vegetables, not a carrot cake with other root vegetables as a substitute. The cake was moist and dark - just how a gingerbread should be - and there were no visible signs of the grated vegetable. It was also surprisingly light, considering I used strong wholemeal flour! The recipe, published in the Guardian, but also in Dan Lepard's recently published book 'Short and Sweet', suggests that parsnips, swede or turnips can be used, and that each vegetable will give a characteristic flavour. I chose parsnips, as that was already available (and needed using up) - this recipe used one large parsnip. I'm not sure I would have described the flavour as reminiscent of hazelnuts though!

The recipe was quite straightforward to follow. One tip, which you probably all know anyway, is if the recipe calls for beaten egg whites, do that first, as you can then beat the rest of the cake without washing the beaters. If you beat the cake batter first, you have to be scrupulous about cleaning the beaters before you can tackle the egg whites.

My only mistake was to use a cake tin bigger than the one stipulated in the recipe - I just picked it out of the cupboard without thinking enough, and it was a 9" tin rather than an 8" one. I  didn't even realise until the cake was halfway through cooking and I noticed it didn't seem to be rising much! Being a shallower cake, it cooked in the minimum time rather than needing the full time suggested.

When the cake was cooled, I finished off with a drizzle of lemon water icing, made with lemon zest and juice. This proved to be the only cause of dissension - Hubs would have liked a full coating of lemon icing, as he didn't think the flavour was strong enough, but FB didn't like the acidity of the topping. I'll definitely be making this again, perhaps trying the swede version next time, but I think in future, I might make a frosting using some syrup from the preserved ginger jar instead of lemon.

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.