Chocolate Roasted Beet Pudding Cake

This is a tested recipe from Canelle Vanille and it's fantastic.

Truly, beautifully fantastic.

And it uses up lots of beets, which I love and need desperately.

Chocolate Roasted Beet Pudding Cake

Citrus. It's not just important for pirates.

Indie Farms' Kumquat

Like making Russian Tea around the holidays? What about fresh squeezed orange juice for those family breakfasts? Planning to ruin some kids' Christmases by stuffing their stockings with Clementines?

That's right, I said it. Kids don't get excited about an orange in their stockings. I don't even celebrate Christmas and I know that.

But you still do it, don't you?

Right on. I'd do it too. Because I love Clementines and, hey, if someone's going to fill a sock with something for me, I'd rather it be sweet little citrus rather than big sweaty foot, am I right?

Who are you trying to fool with fruit in the stocking?

Anyway, I've gotten off track. What I wanted to tell you guys was that, if you want to make sure to have a big sweet (or tart) citrus harvest this winter in NorCal, now's the time to feed your trees.

They're blossoming, setting fruit and getting ready to go to the winter show right now and they need a snack before they go.

The timing and schedule for feeding citrus vary depending on who you talk to, but in the test garden, we feed our potted and planted citrus on a monthly basis with an organic citrus food like Dr. Earth's Fruit Tree Fertilizer. Then we reap a mighty harvest all winter long without fear of the scurvy that plagued our seafaring ancestors.

Arrrrr! Avast ye matey!

What?

Yeah - just making sure you're still paying attention.

Feed me, Seymour.

Feeding your trees is easy:

1. Measure out the recommended amount (based on the size of the tree's trunk) into a garden-only measuring cup.
   
2. Pour it around the base of the tree.
   
3. Mix it in to the surface of the soil by hand.
   
4. Water it in well.
   
5. Walk away for a month. (But still water when the soil is dry to the touch)

This will keep your fruit trees well fed so that, in return, they can make you some food. And fodder for Christmas stockings, much needed adult beverages, holiday gifts (that also happen to be adult beverages) and remedies for cold and flu symptoms.

Want more citrus recipes? Check it.

Medicinal produce that does not require a special card.

Zucchini cupcakes

I've found the best way to get rid of loads of squash (zucchini, crookneck, whathaveyou) is to shred it and put it into chocolate cake.

Because everyone loves chocolate cake and since they don't know that there's evil squash inside, they eat it all up like WOO CHOCOLATE CAKE and I go WOO THE SQUASH IS GONE and then WOO MY PANTS FEEL TIGHT because I love chocolate cake, too. Whoopsy.

But the satisfaction I get from stowing two or three huge squash in something that will be readily disposed of is extreme, and so I carry on. Let's hope my jeans make it through squash season. 

Wow. That's something I've never said before. 

 

Moving on...

If you want to hide all your squash in a cake (and let's face it, who doesn't? It's very fun.) try this recipe from my favorite use-all-your-garden-vegetables cookbook, Serving up the Harvest by Andrea Chessman.

Dark Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes
Adapted from the Dark Chocolate Zucchini Bundt Cake recipe

in Serving up the Harvest, Andrea Chesman

Ingredients

2 1/2 C flour

3/4 C unsweetened cocoa powder

2 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1 t salt

1/2 t ground cinnamon

2 C brown sugar (make sure you have this before you make the whole recipe)

1/2 C butter

2 eggs

2 oz baking chocolate, melted + cooled

1 t vanilla extract

1 C coffee

3 C grated squash (WOO!)

 

 

To make

Preheat oven to 350.

Grease your cupcake tins (this made almost 2 dozen) in whatever fashion suits you.

Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a bowl. And really sift it using a sifter or something because it mixes it nice and gets rid of lumps. No one wants to eat a lump of baking powder, y'all. That's nasty.

 

No lumps. That's all I ask.

Beat together the brown sugar and butter in a mixer and add the eggs one at a time until they're combined. Add in the chocolate and vanilla until combined and then switch off adding the coffee and flour mixture until it's all in there. Scrape down the bowl and then mix in the squash. 

Pour the whole mess into the cupcake tin and bake for approximately 30 minutes or until the toothpick does the Coming Out Clean thing. 

Allow to cool and watch for Cupcake Monsters that do this:

 

Cupcake monsters are the worst kind of monsters.

And then, once they're cooled and you want to impress people, add some powdered sugar to the top to be fancy. If you want, you can use the fancy method I learned while standing in line at the store.

See, as I was buying the brown sugar I thought I had but didn't and was soothing my aggravated soul with a free sample reading of Real Simple, I came across this month's New Uses for Old Things that was to use a tea ball to shake powdered sugar over things. 

I do believe I said aloud to myself: YES. I WILL DO THIS. 

And then I did. See below.

 

Works like a charm.

But, if you're just going to be shoving all the cupcakes into a zippy bag and taking them to work to pawn off on your coworkers who still fit in their jeans, feel free to ditch the fancy sugar and just leave them plain. They're still real good. Promise. I even ate one in the car to prove it - so there.

Now go love on your zucchini. GO.

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.