Chocolate Beet Cake

Alright. It's time to unveil the long awaited recipe for Chocolate Beet Cake.

I used a piecemeal recipe for the root-y cakes for the past few years, until Eric shared his copy of The City Gardeners Cookbook with me. Their recipe for beetcake is totally fantastic. I made some changes but they still turned out super.

1 cups cooked & pureed beets

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

3 oz unsweetened chocolate

3 eggs (substitute for 2 mashed bananas if baking for vegans)

1 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 cup oil

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup white flour

3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

you know the drill:

Preheat oven to 350 deg. F. Melt the chocolate in a double

boiler (or a bowl resting precariously on top of a small pot of simmering water) and let it cool to the point where it wont cook yr eggs. Beat the 3 eggs (or banana substitute) lightly. Add oil, sugar, vanilla, cooled melted chocolate, the applesauce, and the beet mush. Stir it up & set it aside.

Next, sift together yr dry stuff in a different bowl - the two kinds of flour, baking soda & salt. Combine the dry ingredients with the chocolate-beet-goo, and beat until blended. Pour into greased & floured cake pans or muffin tins or cupcake wrappers - whatever you like. Bake for about 35 minutes if making a cake - less if making cupcakes. Use a toothpick to see if the cakes are cooked in the middle.

Set those suckers out to cook on a cooling rack or an overturned milk crate or some other cooling structure. You don't want them to be too warm for frosting, or it will run all over the place.

NOW WE MAKE THE FROSTING:

The recipe I've used recently is fun, hectic and composed primarily of guess-work. Thanks to Mrs. Megan Davis I also have enough frosting in my fridge to last until the apocalypse (2012!?). The idea is to mix together cream cheese, sour cream, butter, powdered sugar, and a little milk until you get frosting. There are lots of other ways to make frosting, this one is pretty dang delicious. Start with a lot of butter, cream cheese, and powdered sugar. Mix 'em up.

Then start to balance out the taste and texture with the sour cream and milk. This is my best advice. I'm sure you can find a recipe with measurements elsewhere, if you're into that.

BEST PART: Add some of the leftover beet juice to the frosting to turn the white frosting pink. Just do it. Even if you don't like pink. Just don't add too much or it will mess with the consistency of the frosting.

Bring your beetcakes to a potluck in

the park!

Bring your beetcakes to a wedding in the forest and stack them high on a cupcake tree!

Bring your beetcakes with you to family reunions!

Bring your beetcakes into the office for stressed co-workers!

Bring your beetcakes into a community garden!

Bring your beetcakes into the world!

These little guys will make you instant friends, I guarantee it. I'm pretty sure these cakes made most of my friends for me last year.

TIP: Don't let beet-naysayers know what they're eating until they start spouting off about how awesome your cupcakes are.

BEETZA > pizza

Remember the last time you tried to make a nice tasty pizza, but your homegrown tomatoes were wiped out by midnight scavengers, and those pesky tomatoes in the store were just too expensive to make a sauce out of, and canned sauce was all sold out in every store in town, and you had just used your last jar of homemade sauce last night on a mediocre pasta dish, and you were facing a pizza apocalypse?

Solution: Beta vulgaris. Beetroot, table beet, garden beet, etc. Take them out of your root cellar where they have been happily hanging out, laughing at other vegetables who rot more quickly and making pun jokes like "hey tomato, when it comes to shelf life, nothing beets us!", or "hey DJ, drop those beets!". Beets make a wonderful savory neon purple sauce, and the creaminess of the boiled root adds a pleasant texture to your beetza. The best thing to happen to beets since sliced beets, or at least since my fellow Prussians invented the sugar beet in 1747.

The method:
Start your favorite pizza dough recipe. Select a bunch of beets, I prefer the dark red Bulls Blood but I am sure golden beets would make an equally vibrant sauce. Peel the beets if they are bitter, or leave the skins on, cube them, and boil until you can easily stab them with a fork. Transfer the beets and a little bit of the beet water into a blender/food processor, and blend until smooth. Now you will have a dark red beet puree. Stir in some tahini, enough to satisfy your sesame craving but not too much that you crowd out the beets. Tamari/soy sauce/Braggs is also good to add in a smaller amount to give it a little salt base. A few pinches of thyme mixes well with the earth taste of the beets, and really, nobody ever has enough thyme for anything (zing!). Now it is ready to step in for tomato sauce and save the world. It may look something like this:




We topped it off with some kalamata olives, green peppers, mozzarella cheese, sun dried tomatoes, red onions, fresh basil, and sliced tomatoes. Other good top additives would be blue cheese, caramelized onion, chopped kale, roasted garlic and anything you want.



If you were to place a crotch near a baked beetza, this is what you may expect it to look like, and if you were to then enjoy a beetza on a second floor porch, it may resemble what you see here, but obviously results may vary depending on crotch and porch.