Cocoa Beet cake

From being active on no blogs, to being active on all three is quite a change! 

This is a quick recipe post, just to document the recipe for the Beet Cocoa cake I made last week, that I was talking about here. 

I have tried making chocolate-beet brownies before, and they turned out OK -moist, fudgy and goodtasting, but not super good like this cake did. I figure in retrospect, that it is very important how you cook your beets, when attempting to prep them for chocolate cake/brownies. The first time around, I had  simply microwaved the beets for about 8 minutes, which had softened them up considerably and made them easy to peel and blitz/blend, but made the cake have a slightly earthy beet-y undertone. So even though the nicer-half said that he couldn't taste the beets, I thought that I could get a faint whiff of them, which wasn't terribly pleasant for me. This time around, I pressure cooked the beets for about 15 minutes, let the cooker cool by itself. The peel slid off the beets very easily, and they pureed to an absolute mush, with no discrete bits discernible.


The other change was to use cocoa instead of chocolate. Ever since I tried out these brownies I've become a big fan of baking with cocoa rather than chocolate. I like the punch that cocoa packs, and it works particularly well in this cake. 


 There are a lot of recipes out there for chocolate-beet cake, but not so many for a cocoa-beet version. I checked out this recipe from The Kitchn for inspiration, but ended up not using it. 


I have been having great success with this vintage recipe for one-egg cake, recently, and decided to use that as a starting point instead. I highly recommend the recipe, since with only a quarter cup of butter (and here you could substitute olive or coconut oil to excellent results) and one egg, it produces a nice light, moist sponge. I've been grating in rinds from two lemons to make a lemon sponge. 


For the cocoa beet cake, I doubled the recipe, halved the sugar, omitted the milk, added one and a half cups of beet puree (pressure cooked the beets and ran them in the blender with no water), and substituted one cup of cocoa powder for the flour. Given my current location, the cocoa is obviously Dutch process :D

Cocoa beet cake with strawberries and whipped cream

Cocoa Beet Cake
Adapted from the One Egg cake vintage recipe at 'Joy of Desserts'


Cream together
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
Once the mix is light and fluffy, add
2 unbeaten eggs
Whip till the mixture is homogenous, and add in stirring to blend
gradually, by the tablespoon, a whole cup of cocoa powder
puree from two large beets, about 1 and 1/2 cups
1 tsp vanilla extract, or Oetker's vanillesuiker (easier to find in the netherlands)
Sift and measure
2 cups all purpose or pastry flour
Add
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
(I totally winged the measurements for the leavening. The cake did rise OK, but sank a little bit while cooling, so modify if you think it needs it)
and sift again
Spoon the flour mixture into the beet-cocoa mixture gradually and fold to incorporate each time. Do not overmix or beat. Pour into pan and bake at 190 c (375 f) for 35 minutes to begin with, and if required add five minutes at a time till toothpick comes out clean.


We had ours topped with the first strawberries of the season and some echte slagroom or real whipped cream