Beetroot and Chocolate Cake

Beetroot bunches are pretty nice to look at. We can't resist buying them, but we struggle to find interesting things to do with these things! We have recently acquired a taste for the leaves: wash them carefully and put them in a saucepan that has a tight-fitting lid. Add just a bit of water, half a glass or so, a slug of olive oil, a few rocks of salt, and put the pan with the lid on to sweat the leaves under high heat. Turn the leaves around a few times and make sure you don't overcook them. We find them a very nice treat, just with an added slug of olive oil and perhaps a few drops of balsamic vinegar. The texture is amazing, very chewy, and the taste quite intriguing.

The other success we've had is to use the beetroots themselves in a chocolate cake. There are quite a lot of recipes for this on the web, the one we use is inspired in all of them! It's hard to detect the presence of the beetroot in the final cake --- but it's there. There's this earthy aftertaste, reminiscent of clay, something hard to explain. The beetroot certainly prevents the cake from drying out, keeps it nice and moist. This is the kind of cake that improves quite a bit with keeping, somehow the beetroot's presence becomes more evident as time progresses.

Ingredients:

-75 g cocoa powder
-180 g all-purpose flour
-1 tsp baking powder
-250 g caster sugar
-250 g beetroot (cooked, say 3 small ones)
-3 large eggs
-200 ml of oil
-1 tsp vanilla extract

Trim the beetroots and wash them carefully. Do not peel them. Put them in a pressure cooker and boil for 10 minutes (after the whistle). Once the beetroot is warm enough to handle, the peel will come off quite easily. The colour is just astonishing! Using a food mill or a food processor, turn the beetroot into a puree (here's when you weigh the beetroot to make sure you have about 250g.) You can also mash them just using a fork, this way the cake will have more structure to it.

In a bowl, mix the beetroot puree with the oil, the vanilla extract, and the eggs. Add all the dry ingredients, mix everything very well, and tip this mixture into a baking tin that has been lined with baking paper. We used a square 20cm tin. Bake at 180 C for about an hour. It does not rise a lot.