Where's the Beet?

We continued our tradition of baking on our annual Tahoe trip this year. Of course, we forgot that it gets tricky baking at altitude but everything turned out OK.

For our recipe we chose Nigel Slater's Extremely Moist Chocolate Beet Cake, which is pretty much fancy red velvet cake. It required us to boil a beet and then, once it was cooled, stick it in a blender. Definitely a novel way to add that red color.

 

At some point I said to Sara, wow, this cake is almost healthy, with the beet, and not too much sugar or flour. Then she pointed to the pile of butter that went into it. OK. Not so healthy after all. But delicious!

Of course the other delicious element was all of the chocolate that went into it -- both dark chocolate chips as well as cocoa powder. And then you had to power a quarter cup of hot espresso over the just melted chips. Even yummier.

Neither Sara nor I were very hopeful about the part of the recipe that required us to beat egg whites to stiff peaks once we found out that the rental house did not have anything electrical to do that for us. In fact, it didn't even have a proper whisk, so I lazily beat the eggs with the most whisk-like contraption we could find.

Do you even know what this thing is? We didn't.

Fortunately our friends Emily and Rachel came to the rescue and, taking turns, managed to beat the eggs to pretty much the right consistency in short order. Amazing!

And the cake turned out perfectly. We opted not to serve it with creme fraiche and poppy seeds, as suggested, but instead with good old vanilla ice cream. The color of the batter was a richer red, very beautiful, but the baked cake was also a lovely red-brown color.

It was a perfect dessert after a hard day of skiing and was well complemented by a glass of champagne.

While Sara and I have no trouble eating vegetables not hidden in sweets, we had a lot of fun with this challenge. Thank you, Daring Bakers!


Ruth from Makey-Cakey was our March 2013 Daring Bakers’ challenge host. She encouraged us all to get experimental in the kitchen and sneak some hidden veggies into our baking, with surprising and delicious results!