I am not a professional cook, nor have I been cooking for a really long time. I just have the rather newly acquired passion, it gets bigger and bigger as I cook more and as people love what I cook more. This motivates me big time! But, I am still learning the secrets of cooking and especially baking. So what do I do when I want to try experiment something really new for me?

For instance, a couple of weeks ago I was thinking to myself and I suddenly had the idea: what if I used beetroot in a cake? Can I do it? So normally at first I thought it would be possible but I was not sure how. Then I googled it. Apparently beetroot goes great with chocolate. So I went through some recipes and I came up with this one cake below that was a killer!

Gee, it’s been a long time since I last ate such a great and quite light chocolate cake…

—

Ingredients:

250 gr. beetroot
100 gr. dark chocolate (I used of course Fazer chocolate)
3 eggs
300 gr granulated sugar
240 ml canola oil (rypsiöljy, but a regular sunflower oil would work too)
1 tsp vanilla extract
30 gr cocoa powder
200 gr flour
1.5 tsp baking soda (ruokasooda)
1/4 tsp salt

To put on top of it:

A)
250 ml heavy cream (kuohukerma)
50 gr (or more, according to your desire) cocoa powder

or

B)
250 ml heavy cream (kuohukerma)
250 gr. dark chocolate (divided in chunks)

—

1. First we’ll deal with the beetroots. Peel the beets and cut them into smaller pieces. Try to cut all the pieces in more or less the same size to cook evenly. Put the pieces in a pan, cover with water. You don’t need to put too much water, it would be normally enough to just cover them but do check them regularly and put more water if you need later on. Put the pan on medium high heat (I put on number 5 out of 6) and boil them until they are tender when you put a fork inside a piece. When they are ready, take them out of the water and just wash them with some cold water to take the highest heat away.

2. Put the cooked beets in a food processor and turn them into puree. Put aside in a small bowl when it is ready.

3. Preheat the oven to 175C.

4. Cut the chocolate into smaller chunks. We will melt it in an improvised bain-marie style :) Put some water in a pan, half-way. Put the chocolate chunks in a smaller pan, which would stay on top of the bigger pan as seen in the picture. Put the heat on medium high. It will melt nicely, but do check every now and then…

5. Take a big bowl and crack the eggs in it. Pour sugar and oil in the bowl and whisk them using a hand whisk until it is a smooth mixture.

6. Now take an electric mixer. Put the beet puree in the same bowl and mix it well.

7. Pour cocoa powder and melted chocolate in the mixture and mix.

8. Now we will add flour. I added the flour in 3 parts gradually, to make life easier and to make sure that I do not put too much flour. In the meantime I continued mixing. With the last batch of flour, I also added salt, baking soda and vanilla extract (sorry but I only remembered to take the photo of baking soda, but you know what vanilla extract and salt looks like, don’t you? don’t you??). Give the whole mixture a final mix to make a smooth and medium fluid batter.

9. Grease / butter your cake mould and sift some flour on it. Pour the cake batter inside and drop it a few times on the counter / table so that the air bubbles trapped inside can pop out. Leave the batter like that for a few minutes to rest. Then put it inside the heated oven.

10. Bake for about 40 minutes. After 30 minutes start checking bit by bit. How? If a metal knife that you stick in the cake comes out clean, then it means you are done. If the cake keep on being muddy but the top of it starts to get over baked, you can make a big line by a knife while it is still inside the oven (that’s why there is a line on the cake in the picture below. Since you will put some topping on the cake, it doesn’t look bad in the end. Just don’t cut it all the way down though! When the cake is ready, take it out of the oven and leave it to cool for a while, then take it out of the cake mould.

11. Now comes the topping. In these photos below I used the topping with the ingredients “B” above. It is a wet and rather liquid topping and it is hot when you pour it on the cake, But it makes it deadly delicious. Especially when you leave it to cool down in the fridge for a while. So how do you do it? Simple: Put heavy cream in a pan and bring it to a boil in medium heat. When it is boiled, put it in a heat proof bowl. Put chocolate pieces in the cream and mix them well with an electric mixer. When you have a smooth cream, pour it on top of the cake, yummmm…!

The other topping is with ingredients “A”. In that one, you use the cream cold, and mix it with the cocoa powder using an electric mixer. You can put as much cocoa powder as you like. It just depends on how sweet you want the cream to be. You can then spread the cream on the cake, this is a cold and solid cream. But I suggest you make it the first way first, you will not get enough of it, even after many days pass….(thanks to a cold fridge of course!).