Beetroot Chocolate Cake :: A recipe

Hello!

I instagrammed this cake today and was asked to post the recipe.  I'm not one to keep yummy recipes to myself so I offer it up here with pleasure.

Now, if you have never had a beetroot chocolate cake, you can be forgiven for thinking EErrrrkkk.  I did, and never thought I would be baking one myself.  But as it turns out, I had a bunch of beetroot leftover in the fridge from a sad abandoned juice diet.  I really dislike feeding my bin dead vegetables (no worm farm or compost presently) and couldn't bear the idea of throwing the beets away.

A side note, I had every intention of seeing the Reboot Your Life juice diet through to the end but I don't actually have a juicer.  Mmmm, bit of a problem.  But I do have a Vitamix (high powered blender) and thought I could get away with it.  

Apple Cherry bake and Green Juice from Reboot Your Life

All was good until I made a veg juice, using the very beetroots in question and found that all the fibre in the juice too much to bear and promptly turned the juice into a pasta sauce and shelved the diet for another day.

Ok, back to the cake recipe!  I found the recipe in a Family Circle booklet "50 of the Best Cakes & Tarts".  The recipe is by Jill Dupleix.  But this is how I made it.  I had 3 beets to use but the cake takes only one large one, so the extra cooked beets were drizzled with oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper and a spike of apple cider vinegar- nom nom nom.

Beetroot Chocolate Cake
serves 8
cooking time: 35 mins (fan force oven)

70g cocoa powder
180g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
250g caster sugar
250g cooked beetroot (see note at start of method)
3 large eggs
200ml sunflower oil
1 tsp vanilla extract

Note: I had 3 beets.  I washed and trimmed them then cut them into quarters and placed them in a steamer until tender.  I then weighed out 250g of cooked beets which ended up being 4 quarters.  So perhaps one large beetroot will do the job!

Preheat over 165C fan force (original recipe is 180C conventional).
Line base of 20cm springform tin.  Mine is old pre dates non-stick so I lightly greased sides and floured.

Sift all the dry ingredients, except sugar, into a mixing bowl, then stir in the sugar til well combined.

Using a blender or food processor (I used my trusty Vitamix), blitz the beetroot.  Then add the eggs, oil and vanilla til smooth.  The colour is amazing at this point, and it gets even better.

Pour the wet bright purple ingredients into the dry, using a balloon whisk to lightly combine.  At this point, I wished a took a photo.  The wet ingredients awakened the cocoa into a deep brown and the bright purple created an awesome swirl against the chocolatey batter. But keep mixing till all is combined.

Pour batter into prepared tin and bake for 30 mins.  Check to see if cooked.  If the testing skewer comes out wet, cover the cake with a bit of foil to stop further browning while you give it another 10 mins or so.  The original recipe says to cook for an hour but a max of 45 mins was enough for my cake.

Let the cake cool a bit before removing the sides.  We ate it hot with a scoop of vanilla ice cream to salve our mouths.

The question is, how did it taste?!  Well, it did taste chocolatey without being too rich and the beetroot gave it an earthy flavour, but only mildly.  In fact, I reckon if I didn't know there was beetroot was in there, I mayn't have noticed.  And it was moist, so goodly moist.

I would like to make this cake again but reduce the sugar.  Perhaps dates or maple?  I'm yet to bake with stevia but I will no doubt venture there too one day.

Have you ever baked a beetroot cake?
Or any other vegetable (besides carrot cake!)?
What do you use to cut back sugar?  Or even to replace it altogether?

xxx