That Chocolate Beetroot Cake

Chocolate Beetroot Cake 

We had eleven talented and enthusiastic bakers here last week on the Bread Matters Baking for a Living Course. Concentrating hard, producing fantastic breads and planning their diverse business ventures works up an appetite and we got through quite a lot of chocolate cake in the coffee breaks. Several people asked for this recipe. Perhaps versions of it will make an appearance one day on their menus in England, Canada, Spain, Cyprus and the Isle of Lewis. 

I've used the very last of our beetroots from the smallholding and the last of the heat from the Primus electric stone-lined oven to bake another batch of four cakes. Here's the recipe:

The original version of this comes from Annette Gibbons’ Home Grown in Cumbria (Zymurgy publishing 2005), a guide to some of the best growers and producers in Cumbria, along with recipes that do their produce justice.  Annette describes herself as a ‘professional cook, not a chef’ and health is a consideration in her recipes. 

There are three other recipes in this book that I can vouch for; herb-filled carrot roulade, baked trout, and hazelnut meringues with berry cream. I haven’t used them much, but Annette has prepared them for celebratory meals, including at least one Royal visit and, at less than three weeks’ notice, for our wedding in 2008. 

Predictably, I’ve adapted this recipe to use organic olive oil rather than sunflower oil, and a mixture of light rye flour and ground almonds to replace the self-raising flour. 

Ingredients

65g cocoa powder

275g half-and-half light rye flour and ground almonds, with a pinch of salt 

and 10g baking powder

220g caster sugar

300ml            olive oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 medium sized eggs, beaten

250g  cooked beetroot, grated

Method

Sift the cocoa powder, flour, salt, baking powder, ground almonds and sugar together.

Whisk the olive oil, vanilla essence and eggs together until they thicken. It may take five minutes or more of whisking to emulsify and begin to look like mayonnaise. 

Add the beetroot and mix well with the dry ingredients. It will turn a vivid purple colour. 

Pour into two prepared 7” sandwich tins or one deep tin. 

Bake in a preheated oven at 190C (gas mark 5 or 375 F). 

Sandwich cakes will take about 35 minutes and deeper cakes longer. 

Chocolate Ganache

150g dark chocolate and 

150ml double cream

Double these quantities if you want to cover the top as well as filling the cake. 

Use the best ingredients you can get hold of. Montezuma’s 73% cocoa dark couverture is my favourite chocolate for baking.  

Method

Warm the cream in a saucepan until it is almost boiling. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate, stirring it while it melts. Whisk the mixture until it becomes glossy. (A mixer will do this in a minute or two.) Use the ganache to sandwich the two cakes and (if you wish) to cover the top. 

For a special occasion, I sometimes decorate this cake with little beetroots, made from marzipan and coloured with the beetroot juice. Now that I’ve perfected our slow-dried beetroot ‘crisps’, some of which resemble rose petals, I might even use those.