I found this recipe years ago. I’ve made it quite a few times, as writ, with the chocolate but always found the the cocoa overwhelmed the colour of the beetroot.

This time I thought that I might drop the cocoa and focus more on the beetroot. I erred in thinking that I needed to sub something in to replace the cocoa – I didn’t actually need to because the cocoa is not vital to the actual baking process – and added one then two (because one seemed too weak) tablespoons of Moccona coffee granules.

Everything else was as per the instructions

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup of cocoa powder (nope, 2 tablespoons of Moccona coffee)
• 11/2 cups of flour
• 11/2 teaspoon of baking powder
•  A pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 cups of castor sugar
• 1 cup of light olive oil
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• 3 free range eggs beaten
• 1 cup of cooked beetroot, pureed
• 2 tablespoons of walnuts, finely chopped

Method

• Sift the cocoa, flour, baking powder and salt.
• Mix with the sugar.
• Add the oil, vanilla, eggs, beetroot & walnuts.
• Mix well – until it is a glorious purple colour.
• Pour into a buttered and floured 18cm (7in) round or square pan.
• Bake at 190 degrees for 50 minutes, or until an inserted skewer comes out clean.
• Cool before removing from the pan.

Icing

• 1 cup of cashew nuts (110g)
• 1/4 cup of strong coffee
• very scant 1/4 teaspoon of black sea salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoon of pure maple syrup (10g)
• 4 tablespoons of vanilla castor sugar

Place the nuts in a cereal-sized bowl and cover them with water. Let them sit at least 6 hours, or, better still, overnight.

Drain the liquid, then combine all the ingredients in a small food processor or blender until super-smooth.

Apply this evenly over the cooled cake.

Insights

If you’re going to add coffee to a cake, do it the same way as the icing and mix it into a paste or small quantity of super strong coffee. The dark flecks in the cake are the undissolved Moccona granules. The additional moisture might not go astray either.

I hate the quantity of oil that goes into the this recipe but love the rich colour from the beetroot. I’m going to retest on this by using beetroot in the same cake base as last night’s kumara cake. That will probably use more beetroot so I’d be anticipating an even richer colour.

The cashew and coffee icing absolutely rocks!! It makes this cake. The coffee kick is quite strong but any potential bitterness is more than mitigated by the sugar and lemon. It was just a little slushy so next time I will reduce the quantity of liquid in the coffee.

I like walnuts so will double the quantity next time.

Edit: forgot to name my source, Chocolate Covered Katie, which I found through this great list at Skinny Mom – I am keen to try some of these other icings but really want to focus on pumping out moist cakes first…