Chocolate beet cake

Pudding. That's all I want to eat these days. Rice pudding, tapioca pudding, maybe even bread pudding. I even made a cornstarch based vanilla pudding, but it was too starchy for me. I like custardy puddings best, and would be quite happy with baked custard and more crème caramel. So, maybe I'll be back in a few days with a pudding, but for now I've made you a cake. The quest for beet cake started back in October when I first moved. My mother gave me a large bag of beets and I was looking for ways to use them. I made one, but wasn't completely happy with it, so the draft of that post languished until the other day when I had more beets to use up. Yes, they were from my mother again. She likes to send me home with iron-rich foods. Thanks, Mom.

Oh, and guess what? I got a brand-new stove! I got home the other day, and there it was. So far, so good. The temperature is spot-on, and it goes up to 500℉, which is 100℉ hotter than my old oven, and means I can make great pizza and bread again. In fact, I've already made pizza, but I ate it all up, alongside some celery soup, which is my new favourite soup. My old oven was probably donated to a museum, or maybe you can see one just like it on an old episode of Happy Days. I'm hoping the new stove shakes me out of my blog ennui. I just don't feel like making much these days, and can never find the time to take pictures or write about what I make. Work has been busy and daylight is hard to find. Also, puddingy things are not the most photogenic desserts, at least not in my hands.

Anyway, I went looking for a beet cake recipe online, and found a few, but none of them were quite right. One used 2½ cups of oil for 2-9" layers, which seemed like an awful lot. Another one used chocolate, which I didn't have on hand (it's also in Portuguese, but that's not a big problem: I speak food rather well). The third one used just a little chocolate and spice, so that wasn't it either. Still another one used raw beets, but I had already roasted mine, and had no intention of buying more. So, slightly disappointed that I didn't have a Goldilocks moment, I decided to wing it. That's not as hard as you might think, especially if you understand the interactions between ingredients and what purpose they serve in a baked good. Some folks, especially non-bakers, think of baking as chemistry, where everything has to be just so for it to work. That's just not true! You may not get a prize-winner on your first try, but something made with lots of butter, sugar, eggs and flour will only rarely be a total fail. Here's how I went about developing this recipe:

• I wanted to use oil, as in a carrot cake, for moistness. I also didn't think the taste of butter would come through with all the cocoa and the beets. Oh, and I had bought 2.5 litres for the doughnut challenge
• I had no chocolate, only cocoa
• I was having trouble getting a fine enough puree of beets on their own, so I knew I needed to add something else to the food processor. Buttermilk and cocoa make a great cake, so I went with that. And I had found a litre of it in the back of the fridge. Expiry date today!
• I like brown sugar in chocolate cakes, so I used it
• Buttermilk and brown sugar are acidic, meaning that baking soda would be a good addition. I also added baking powder. Think of it as leavening insurance
• Usually when I make up recipes I don't measure anything, but I did this time. I used my scale because it was easier to see the proportions of ingredients. Sorry, no cup measurements this time!

Go ahead, pile on the whipped cream! You're having beets for dessert.

Chocolate Beet Cake (Updated, based on my friend Judy's results and my 3rd remake)

200 grams all-purpose flour
75 grams Dutch-process cocoa
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
200 grams brown or white sugar
200 grams cooked beet
½ cup water
100 grams buttermilk (or yogurt, or sour cream)
2 eggs
150 grams oil

1. Preheat oven to 350℉/180℃. Grease a 10” pan and line with parchment.
2. Sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
3. Puree beets and buttermilk until smooth. Add eggs, brown sugar, cocoa mixture and oil and combine well. (I just put all this in the food processor and liquified it)
4. Pour over dry ingredients and whisk to combine. Do not overmix.
5. Scrape into pan and bake for 30-40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. (May take longer)
6. Cool in pan on rack, then turn out of pan. Dust with icing sugar and serve with whipped cream.

The verdict? Well, the top was very cracked, but it was very moist, chocolaty and fudgy. It doesn't taste of beets at all. I found it perfect with whipped cream and a cup of coffee.

This is the first one I made, back in October. It had more cocoa, no water,
less oil and a fussier preparation. It looks much the same as version 2 though.

The Daring Cooks make soufflé!

I realize there is a bottle of Amaretto right behind the soufflé, but there was no time to move it!

Watching a soufflé rise in the oven is way better than anything you can find on television. I watch what's happening in my oven all the time, but this was the best show I've seen in ages, and I wouldn't mind watching a repeat. In fact, I think there should be a specialty channel: Soufflé TV.

After a few minutes. They started out level with the top of the dish.

This month's challenge comes to us from the lovely Linda and Dave of MonkeyShines in the Kitchen. For my sweet soufflé, I couldn't decide what to make, meaning I left this close to the deadline. I had some lovely homemade applesauce from freshly picked apples, but then I made something else with it. Oops. Passionfruit? A favourite flavour, but I kept forgetting to pick any up. Banana? Possibly. Then I spied the bag of oranges in the back of the fridge. Orange and Amaretto are one of my favourite flavour combinations. I used a simple recipe and added orange zest, along with a couple of tablespoons of Amaretto.

After 10 minutes or so. MonkeyShines described these as rocket ships!

The soufflé mixture was fairly liquid, from the booze, I guess, and I was afraid it would spill over the edge and end up on the bottom of my oven. That didn't happen, and as you can see, they rose rather well. I was actually afraid they were going to propel themselves right out of the dish! I took the one on the right out after about 18 minutes, as I like a creamy centre. I left the other one in the oven while I took pictures, and it was fine--just a bit drier. These tasted wonderful--they were crispy on the edges from the sugar crust, and had a lovely orange flavour. The Amaretto was subtle, but I fixed that:

By scooping out a place for more Amaretto. Mmm. Getting pictures of these was the trickiest part, as they don't last long, and it was a partially cloudy day. The sun was playing cat and mouse, or, more accurately, playing chicken. I need to work on my food styling, but I was satisfied with the taste, and that's what counts for me. But that's not all...

I also made a savoury soufflé, a beet and feta one, soon after the challenge was revealed. It made a nice lunch, but didn't puff as much as I wanted. The texture was creamy, though, and the feta added bursts of flavour. It looked like a big fuschia cauliflower, I think.

Can you see me, reflected in the kettle?

Blog-checking lines: Dave and Linda from Monkeyshines in the Kitchen chose Soufflés as our November 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge! Dave and Linda provided two of their own delicious recipes plus a sinfully decadent chocolate soufflé recipe adapted from Gordon Ramsay’s recipe found at the BBC Good Food website.

Recipes and full challenge PDF after the jump.

Daring Cooks put things in jars!

This month's Daring challenge was to preserve some of summer's bounty, in jars, or by freezing. What a great idea, as I know lots of Daring Cooks had been eager for just such a challenge. The theme was selected by John of Eat4Fun, who is a longtime member of the Daring Kitchen. I have been canning and preserving things since high school, but I loved this challenge! I made 10 things in a 3-day preserving spree, which coincided with a 33℃, high humidity heat wave. I think I may have contributed to that, with all the boiling pots. Above you can see crabapple jelly, the prettiest of the lot, I think. I had never made this before, and it turned out very sweet, but will be perfect for glazing tarts, or just eating on bread...

This is how many crabapples it took to make 5 x 250ml jars:

Next up was plums, of which I had a veritable windfall. My aunt's neighbour's tree was covered in fruit that nobody knew what to do with. I got about 5 kilograms and made 5 small jars of of plum-cardamom butter and 12 small jars of plum jam. 

The plum jam:

The plum-cardamom butter:

The difference between butter and jam is that a butter has less sugar and is cooked longer, to a thicker consistency and darker colour. I think cardamom and plums are perfect together.

I also made a jar of peaches, spiced with rum, tonka beans, mace, sapote and vanilla. The extra syrup from this was great with yogurt:

On to the savoury things. I helped my mother to make pickled beets (5 kg worth) and chili sauce (25 kg of tomatoes). Next, I saw a recipe for a beet and horseradish relish using roasted tomatoes. I don't usually love relish, but I really wanted to try this recipe. It's from The River Cottage Preserving Handbook, and you'll find it after the jump. I got my orange marmalade and rhubarb jam recipes from the same book. This book does not often recommend processing jars in a boiling water bath, but is reliable, I think. There was a lot of discussion on the forum about processing and it seems to US recommendations are much stricter than in other parts of the world. I usually always finish my jars in a boiling water bath, but I was surprised to learn that my mother and all her relatives do not, even when working with low acid foods. To quote her: 'nobody's died yet'. No, but I still boiled my jars. :)

This stuff is fantastic--sweet and tangy. It called for fresh horseradish, which I found growing in my mother's backyard, but you could use prepared. Here's what the fresh looks like:

Here's a fairly bad picture of everything but the plum jam lined up on the windowsill:

Left to right: chili sauce, rum peaches, bread and butter pickles, pickled beets, orange marmalade, beet relish, rhubarb jam, crabapple jelly, plum-cardamom butter, pickled horseradish

The orange marmalade was made this winter, for a Daring Bakers' challenge, and the rhubarb was made this spring.

Blog-checking lines: The September 2010 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to challenge The Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing. He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it. John’s source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home Food Preservation.