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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Banana and Coconut Birthday Cake

Alex and I have just come back from a well-deserved break in Paris, where, very predictably, we gorged ourselves on baked delights. It was so nice to be able to eat shop-bought cakes and pastries after a few weeks of playing with the oven in the name of Alex's birthday cake! I'd spent the end of June anxiously perusing all the cake recipes I could get my hands on in a bid to find one simple enough to make on the morning of his birthday without stress, yet still a little bit more special than a plain cake. In the end I settled on banana and coconut cake with cream cheese frosting, inspired by Sugary and Buttery's amazing looking cake. I used a steadfast banana cake recipe that my mum's been using for 20+ years, with added desiccated coconut and a little Malaysian twist of gula melaka (coconut palm sugar) substituting in for some of the caster sugar. 

Ingredients for the cake:
• 6 oz butter
• 3 oz caster sugar, 3 oz gula melaka (or dark muscovado sugar)
• 2 eggs
• 6 oz self raising flour, sifted
• 2 small mashed bananas
• Handful of desiccated coconut

Ingredients for the frosting:
• 2 tubs Philadelphia cream cheese
• Honey to sweeten

Grease a baking tin and line bottom with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 180ºC (350ºF). 

Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, adding a tablespoon of flour with the second egg. Fold in the remaining flour with the bananas. Add the desiccated coconut and a splash of vegetable oil - I didn't do this but desiccated coconut tends to suck the moisture out of everything (!) so this might help keep things moist. 

Pour mixture into baking tin and bake for 20-25 minutes or until the cake looks golden and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Turn on to a wire rack to cool.

Use an electric hand whisk to whip the cream cheese and honey together, tasting as you go, until creamy. You can put it into a frosting bag and pipe it on to the cake when cool, but I chose to use a spatula to spread it!

Give it a go - it takes so little time and is perfect for a baking beginner who's attempted a banana cake before. The frosting is also extremely addictive. You could slice the cake in two horizontally when it comes out of the oven and have another layer of honey cream cheese in the middle if you're feeling decadent...

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Mini Adventures #5

So. I've clearly been eating my stresses this week. (Kummerspeck, anyone?) Over half of my mini adventures are food-related! Pretty sure it's A's bad influence - he's come to stay with me for a couple of weeks and, being a sweet-toothed male, loves to eat at least one pudding a day. I weighed myself on Wednesday and I'm hovering around the top end of what I would consider to be my average weight range, so I might need to cut down on those puddings pretty darn soon...:P

Here's what I've been loving this week.

1) Digging into a box of Pierre Marcolini Palets Fins chocolates. Part of the joy of these chocolates is how beautifully designed they are. That typography is gorgeous, plus they're so thin that they snap in half with one bite. They only have a small amount of filling in them too, so you won't feel like a total pig if you only have one at a time. (Yup...I'm in denial). My favourites have been the Praliné Pistache Noisette and the Caramel Mangue. 

BBC's Monkey Planet

2) Watching Monkey Planet - a new BBC 3-part documentary about primates that A and I have become a wee bit obsessed with. It's amazing how closely related we are to primates. My favourite moments so far have been the scene where an orangutan mimics humans having a wash by soaping up next to a river, and the part in the second episode where presenter George McGavin (who is GREAT) uses his iPhone to demonstrate how some species of monkeys have established a proto-language. We've been snuggling down to watch it on iPlayer on Thursday evenings, and I fear I'm going to be bereft without it when it ends this Thursday...

3) Ordering pizzas late at night from Sacro Cuore, my favourite local pizza place down in Queen's Park. It's had some bad reviews regarding its customer service but I've never experienced that as I always order and pick up. Besides, the pizzas themselves are deliziose and that's all I care about! Tartufata, my pizza of choice every time I order, is the absolute bomb. 

4) Seeing the blossoms shedding on the streets. It's like walking through a Japanese anime in Queen's Park right now; pink blossom petals fall gently to the ground in the spring breeze to swirl around your feet in little eddies. I hope that was a sufficiently gagworthy description. Seriously, though, if I could get married in a grove of blossoms in the spring (somewhere warm) with petals falling all around me I totally would.

5) Trying Gü's new After Dark pots - 'Gü York Cheesecakes'! So tasty, and they were on offer. Just one of many puddings that has disappeared into my tummy this week. My life is wild, I know.

6) Hanging out at A's grandparents' place in south-east London. Their garden is so pretty, with a winding path that leads to a little semi-wooded area of bluebells. We had fun picking bay leaves for future Italian-inspired recipes and sitting in the sunshine.

7) Working chez Gail's Kitchen in Bloomsbury. I love Gail's - all the pastries are wonderful as they taste home-cooked, and they have a fair few branches around London now (including one on my doorstep in Queen's Park). For lunch I had a juicy sausage roll with tomato sauce...and then a slice of their incredible carrot cake. Ok, I have no one to blame for my pudding addiction but myself.

8) Wearing a panoply of jumpers. My house is so cold at the moment, even when it's warm and sunny outside! Walking out of the house is literally like transitioning from the dead of winter to spring. Ok so maybe this isn't the most adventuresome of the things I've done this week, but it means I'm getting an extra bit of use out of all the jumpers I'm going to have to pack away soon! (Who am I kidding...jumpers come in useful all year round in good old Blighty). This one's a favourite, bought from Topshop last autumn. And yes, although it's mercifully over-exposed, I am makeupless in this selfie. I wear very, very little makeup, if any, when it's dissertation/revision o'clock. And frankly the hair is lucky if it gets brushed.

8) Counterbalancing all that pudding eating with some healthy smoothies! Ok, maybe not totally healthy. I know drinking smoothies and juice is basically like pouring sugar down your throat. But the two I drank this week kept me hydrated, and had a few 'super' ingredients in them too, so they were hopefully better than nothing! I had a Bliss Blend from Crussh - a tasty blend of coconut, mango, pineapple and orange, 98% fat-free probiotic yoghurt and their 'bliss blend booster', a mix of vitamins and amino acids that's supposed to activate mood-improving endorphins and relax the body. I also tried out the new 'ENERGISE' drink from the Innocent Super Smoothie range. It's got guarana and flax seeds in it alongside strawberries, cherries and apple. There are much healthier green smoothies available from both Crussh and Innocent, but I clearly wasn't feeling virtuous enough this week. Clearly. Erm...maybe after exams I'll do a big detox?

A lot of these photos go straight on to my Instagram, which you can follow below if you wish to see more of my gluttonous escapades!

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