Chocolate beet cake and roasted beet puree

I did a little experiment over the rainy and non-gardeny weekend wherein I set out to try two things:

1. See if I could successfully create an easy, delicious and not-too-sweet chocolate cake by swapping beet puree for oil in a boxed cake mix.
2. Pioneer Woman's purported Best Frosting

I am now happy to announce that both experiments were successful.

On the part of the frosting, we can all just give that a big old, "DUH", and move on because since when is one of PW's recipes a dud? Like, never. It's a really good frosting and, it's not super sweet and overly sugary like most frosting, homemade or store-bought.

The cake though? Well, the cake was easy like Sunday morning and as delicious as whatever day is known to be delicious. Thursday? I don't know. Maybe Thursday is a renowned day of deliciousness somewhere.

Anyway, the cake came out amazingly well and the substitutions were awesomely easy. So easy, in fact, that I decided to go all the way with this cake experiment and actually make a traditional layer cake. Something I've not made or had in quite some time due to the rise in popularity of the cupcake. 

Let's not get into my opinion of cupcakes, though.


I found a dark chocolate boxed cake mix at my neighborhood market and promptly followed the directions for baking this mundane beast exactly as called for by the box save for the 1/2 cup of oil.

In that case, I subbed out the oil for the same amount of roasted beet puree, mixed it up with the Kitchenaid and baked two cake pans' worth for the called-for amount of time.

The result? Um, perhaps better than if I'd made it with the oil.

Seriously.

This cake was way good.

Also, though, to employ a snobbish food term that I don't *really* understand, it had a nice crumb. To put it in my terms: it was sproingy without being dry and it wasn't dense at all - where you feel like you're slicing into a giant block of fudge.

And there wasn't any actual beet flavor to be found in this cake, even though the four of us tasting it (or shoveling it into thy face, as some *might* have been) tried real hard to ferret it out.

Before you get started on beet-ing up your boxed chocolate cake mix, make the roasted beet puree as follows and then wait for this cake to blow your hair back. 


It's delicious.

Roasted Beet Puree

Makes approximately 1/4 cup of puree per beet

Ingredients

1+ Beets, topped, scrubbed clean, pricked with a fork

To make

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees.

Wrap beets in foil, 4-5 to a packet and roast in your preheated oven for 55 minutes, or as long as it takes for a fork to easily pierce them to their very core.


Remove beets from their foil packet and with a paper or clean kitchen towel (you may not want to use your best linens for this very RED task), hold each beet in your hand and rub/slide their skins off. 


Put all the skinned beets into a food processor and puree until smooth.


Bag up your beet puree and freeze for up to a year, thawing as needed to retrieve puree for cakes and the like.