My friend presented me with a bag full of mud covered, fresh out the ground beetroots …. cheers Pal! Truth be told I don’t even like beetroot but I could hardly be rude and tell him that! Then I remembered the fairly recent discovery of this beetroot and chocolate, super moist, apparently deliscious, gross sounding cake and decided THAT is what I’ll do with the bag of beets. A lot of the recipes I found called for cooking the beetroot first, that apparently takes hours and with my friends due soon I didn’t have time for that, look hard enough though and you’ll find what you’re after – a recipe calling for raw beetroot, thank you Daily Mail.

I warn you now, there’s a LOT of grating involved it took blooming ages but the end result really was a super moist, mega tasty, will most definitely make again cake. The recipe suggested sprinkling icing sugar on the top but I opted for a cream cheese frosting which went very well, I used a slightly bigger quantity for mine simply because I had a lot of beetroot but I will share the original, it’s a very rich cake so actually bigger wasn’t really better in this case!

Ingredients

• 250g butter, softened
• 325g dark muscovado sugar
• 4 medium eggs, lightly beaten
• 250g plain flour
• 2tsp baking powder
• 2 heaped tbsp cocoa powder
• 450g raw beetroot, peeled (discard the skin) and grated finely
• 115g dark chocolate, grated
• 2tsp vanilla essence

Method

• Preheat oven to 180c, 160c if fan assisted. Grease and line an 8″ deep cake tin
• In a large bowl beat the sugar and butter until light and fluffy (I used a hand whisk and it took about 5 mins)
• Continue to beat while slowly pouring in the beaten eggs until all mixed through
• Sift in the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder, stir eell
• Add the grated beetroot, chocolate and vanilla essence. Give the mixture a good mix with a spatula until you’re sure all the ingredients are fully combined
• Pour into your prepared tin and bake in the centre of your oven for 60 mins or until a skewer comes out clean, keep an eye towards the end of baking as some ovens cook slightly faster etc, it may be worth check after 50 mins to see how it’s getting on
• Leave to cool in the tin for 15 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling

 

 

You can dust with icing sugar or if you’d prefer cream cheese icing I used 50g softened unsalted butter, 125g full fat cream cheese and 300g sifted icing sugar. Beat all three together until pale and fluffy then dollop on the top of your cake and spread around with a palette knife.

I may give courgette cake a go next time … have any of you tried it before? Xx