Chocolate Beetroot Cake

The idea of finding vegetables in one's cake may be slightly perturbing, but give them a chance. I'm sure carrot cake was met with horror and disdain once upon a time, after all. Well, okay. Maybe cauliflower wouldn't do so well in a cake. Or aubergines. 

Beetroots, however. Little mauve globes of joy, perfect when chopped into a salad with some goat's cheese and walnuts. Gorgeous when roasted alongside a chicken and eaten alongside caramelised potatoes on a warm summer's evening. You might not have thought of putting them in a cake. But believe me, beetroot, when introduced into chocolate cake, makes for the fudgiest, moistest bake I've made this summer. 

I've actually been pretty obsessed by chocolate beetroot cake for a while. Last autumn I cycled to Stickybeaks, a wonderful café tucked away on a back street in central Cambridge, for a little bit of headspace. (Please, please visit if you're ever making a trip to Cambridge - hands down best cake in the city.) I wandered to the counter, ordered a slice of their chocolate beetroot cake and sat down to pore over books for an essay. The waitress brought it to the table with a steaming cup of tea and a smile. I put a forkful in my mouth and swooned inwardly. The combo of chocolate with beetroot works beautifully because the beets, naturally sweet, impart both moistness and an extra layer of flavour depth to the cake. And for those who are wondering, no, the cake doesn't taste like a garden salad - the chocolate almost completely masks the beetroot taste. The beetroots give the cake a gorgeous reddish tinge which is only really discernible in the day time and through photos. It's sort of like a natural red velvet in this sense - you get the lovely chocolatey taste with the scarlet colour, but with no added food colouring!

I mentioned in my post about our homegrown veg and fruit that we've been growing a ton of beetroots this summer. We've been roasting them, slicing them into salad, trying them in pasta... I decided I absolutely had to try my hand at baking with them last weekend. I haven't quite mastered the art of beautiful bakes yet (à la The Great British Bake-Off, which I watch religiously every year), but my family and A absolutely loved the result. The cake was demolished within mere days, and now I'm being begged to make another! Give it a go and see what you think!

Chocolate beetroot cake (adapted from Nigel Slater)

Ingredients:

300g beetroot, washed thoroughly

200g good dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)

200g butter

135g plain flour

1 heaped tsp baking powder

3 tsp good quality cocoa powder

4 tbsp hot espresso

5 eggs

190g golden caster sugar

Crème fraîche to serve

• Cook your beetroot whole and unpeeled in boiling unsalted water. They should be tender in roughly half an hour, though if you're using young ones, keep checking them after about twenty minutes. Drain them, cool them under cold running water, then peel them (this bit's messy - you might want to use gloves!) slice off their stem and root, pop in a Magimix or food processor and blitz to a rough purée.

•While your beetroots are cooking, lightly butter a loose-bottomed cake tin, lining the base with a disc of baking parchment. Set the oven at 180ºC/Gas Mark 4. 

•Snap your chocolate into small pieces and melt them in a bowl resting over simmering water, making sure that the water doesn't touch the bowl. Don't stir. When the chocolate looks like it's nearly molten, pour your hot espresso over it and stir once.

•Cut your butter into small pieces and add to the melted chocolate, using a spoon to dip the butter pieces under the surface of the chocolate. Leave to soften over a low heat.

•Sift together the flour, baking powder and cocoa, and set aside.

•Separate your eggs, placing the whites in a large mixing bowl. Stir the yolks together. Remove the chocolate from the heat and gently stir the butter until it has melted into the chocolate. Leave for a few minutes, then quickly stir in the egg yolks, mixing firmly and evenly so that the eggs blend with the mixture. When you've done this, fold in your blitzed beetroot.

•Whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then gently fold in the sugar to avoid losing the air. Firmly but tenderly (Nigel's words, not mine!) fold the beaten egg whites and sugar into the chocolate mixture using a large metal spoon, using a deep figure of 8 movement. Be careful not to over-mix.

•Fold in the flour, baking powder and cocoa, making sure it's well combined. Transfer quickly to the prepared cake tin and put in the oven, immediately turning your heat down to 160ºC/Gas Mark 3. Bake for 45 mins, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

•Leave to cool (don't worry if it sinks a bit!) then loosen the cake with a palette knife around the edges after about half an hour. Try very hard not to remove the cake from its tin until completely cold (I failed at this because of hungry parents...) Serve in thick slices with a dollop of crème fraîche. 

Enjoy! 

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Notes from the Garden

I love our family garden. A year and a half ago, we dug four big plots for fruit and vegetables, and have been enjoying homegrown produce alongside the standard flowers in the garden ever since. Having an urban kitchen garden makes me fantasise, à la Marie Antoinette, about having my own little farm with greenhouses, chickens and beehives. Maybe one day.

The first half of this summer was fairly slow in terms of harvestable produce, but the yield has just exploded in these past few weeks thanks to the combination of heatwave and rain we've been having in London! In June we had strawberries, pineberries, rocket and broadbeans. July brought rhubarb, gooseberries, artichokes and spinach. This month, we're enjoying absolutely tons of cucumbers, tomatoes, several varieties of courgettes, tatsoi, pak choi, Russian red kale and brambles! We've also had beetroots all summer long (which is amazing seeing as I only planted a few seeds over Easter!) We've also got dill, basil, rosemary, sage, tarragon and French beans in pots and the plots and almonds, olives and figs growing on the trees, but I doubt the latter two will ripen without another few weeks of concentrated sun. It's been a prolific summer. 

Here's a mix of DSLR and phone photos to show you some of the things we've been growing in the garden this year!

Regular basil and Thai sweet basil.

Pretty rhubarb.

White cosmos, planted by Alex.

Essential gardening kit!

Mini tomatoes.

Lavender.

Almonds.

Sage flowers and a white allium.

Baby figs.

Beans, an 8-ball courgette, cucumber and tatsoi.

My mother's pride and joy.

A tromboncino d'albenga, so named because it looks a bit like a mini trombone. 

While we were away, the vegetables went crazy. 8-ball and chiaro di nizza courgettes that turned into marrows, and the tromboncini d'albenga grew insanely long!

We filled the marrows with minced beef for lunch.

A tree-like tatsoi leaf.

The garden in the early morning.

Matching my nails to my beetroots. Because vegetables are the best fashion accessories...

Brambles that stained my fingers, with a borage flower on top.

With limited space, gardening can be difficult in London, but it's very therapeutic to look after plants and reap the benefits a few weeks later. I especially love growing vegetables because it means we hardly need to buy them from the supermarket over the summer! 

Do you like gardening, and if so, what do you grow? 

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Beekeeping at Walworth Garden Farm

We touched down at Gatwick yesterday to encounter the biggest queues leading up to passport control I've ever seen. Hordes of tetchy travellers jostled with each other, sweating profusely in corridors decidedly lacking air conditioning. UK airports are the worst thing about holidays for sure! I'm home now and going through a ton of amassed photos and queued posts that I wasn't able to share last week thanks to the patchy internet at my Bodrum hotel (though the rest of the experience was great, can't wait to write about it!) The first one I wanted to share was a long overdue post about the two-part beekeeping course I went on last month!

Walworth Garden Farm is a lovely place to explore if you're in the Kennington area. It's a tiny botanical garden meshed with a vegetable allotment, with greenhouses, a little classroom for school groups (and adult learners like ourselves!) and, of course, beehives. 

Over the course of two sessions we learned about the theory and biology behind the process of hive building and the hierarchy within the hive, as well as practical tips on how to start and maintain your own hives. 

Kevin, our wonderful teacher, also took us to the hives in full beekeeping gear (though he didn't wear any himself, not even gloves!) to look at the different combs and boxes. I was slightly terrified at this point, with clouds of bees buzzing around my head and knocking into my veil. I was particularly paranoid about the tiny gap of flesh exposed between my ankle and the beesuit, as apparently bees have a habit of crawling up your trousers. This part was fascinating though - especially seeing how placid the bees become when you pump smoke at them!

After the terror of being surrounded by tens of thousands of bees subsided, we went back to the classroom and assuaged any trauma with honey tasting.

I decided I preferred lighter honeys like clover and acacia over dark honey (such as chestnut), which tastes much richer and much more medicinal - almost like licorice! 

After the course we listened to a talk by Southwark guerrilla gardeners (of course) and wandered around the farm a bit more to take in the beautiful flowers and fruit growing in the gardens.

A bumblebee bum.

And the wondrous honeybee!

The course provided a fantastic introduction to keeping bees. I'm really inspired to keep my own in the future, and follow bee-friendly initiatives, like the ones I wrote about in my last post on saving the bees. Amazingly, the course was free! Walworth offer lots of other free courses and workshops throughout the year such as gardening, bumble bee walks and making cosmetics and candles from beeswax, so check out their website if it's the sort of thing you're interested in!

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