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Beetroot, chocolate (and raw cocoa) brownies

Posted on July 16, 2008 | 9 comments

Beetroot, (chocolate and raw cocoa) brownies

I read about this recipe in the riveting Riverford Farm Cook Book I have been raving about, only I have customised it somewhat.

I have never thought about beetroot in cakes until I read Riverford’s recipe and then it was an “of course” moment – beetroot cake is the new carrot cake. The beets are sweet-tasting, easy to mush when cooked and not too watery. And plentiful, seasonal and grown-locally.

I used half the sugar the recipe called for, and also omitted its cocoa powder and baking powder. This was after eating the most wonderful date-and-walnut cake at Saturday’s party, baked by the Great Cake Company. Great, indeed. Cakemaker, Chris, generously shared her secret: rice flour, loads of butter and eggs. And no raising agents. Not necessary, she said.

Instant liberation! No more raising agents – just eggs. Yippee.

Going slightly off piste, I also added soaked prunes and raw cocoa nibs.

And here, thanks to the Riverford Farm Cook Book, is how I did it.

I melted a 150g bar of Green & Black’s cooking chocolate with 200g of butter, cubed, in a bowl, over a pan of boiling water.

The recipe calls for 250g but a 150g bar seemed to do it, plus I added 150g of raw cocoa nibs which are a natural stimulant and highly nutritious. Raw cocoa stays wildly crunchy and feels terribly healthy.

I had cooked the 250g beetroot the day before and now I whizzed the peeled purple beauties (and about 12 soaked prunes) in my trusty food processor, dating circa 1980s. The recipes calls for three eggs, but I whizzed-in four eggs (organic and free range of course), one by one. Then more whizzing with 100g of rapadura sugar (instead of the recipe’s 200g caster sugar).

Then with a large spoon, I folded in 50g of rice flour (which is gluten-free) and 100g ground almonds. All ingredients were organic, naturellement.

I miraculously found a baking tin of roughly the right proportions (28x18cm), greased it with butter and lined it with foil as I had no baking parchment. And placed it in the preheated oven at Gas 4/180 degrees C. It took half-an-hour. But don’t overcook it!

Omigod, were those brownies yum. Not too sweet, with crunchy bits and mousse-like lightness.

9 Comments

Posted in food, health, organic, recipe

Tagged beetroot, brownies, chocolate, raw cocoa, Riverford Farm Cook Book, the Great Cake Company

Almond and chocolate cake

Posted on March 10, 2008 | 1 comment

Cake with a pot of clotted cream

Cakes need precision. Although I rarely use scales, they come out in a baking moment. Still, as long as you have the basic riff down – such as the proportion to eggs to sugar to butter to flour – there’s some room to improvise.

My sister and her partner came for dinner on Saturday and I was visited by a vision of an almond and chocolate cake. (Mercedes was out of town so no chance of her faultless recipe.)

I alighted on a recipe from the internet, and another one from a back issue of Olive magazine. But oh. One recipe was in ounces, the other in grammes. And I am numerically challenged.

On top of which we all got soaked in the blustery rain which meant I had to lie down on our return. When I regained consciousness, I had 40 minutes to make dinner for four and whip up my almond vision.

I kept trying to talk myself out of attempting a cake under such circumstances. But I wouldn’t listen. While the brown rice was cooking, spinach steaming, sweet potato and coconut simmering and sunflower seeds roasting, I broke two eggs in a bowl and started whisking.

No turning back now. I was committed. The Olive magazine recipe said 2 eggs go with 90g of butter, 200g of chocolate, 55g of sugar and 150g of ground almonds. After that I was on my own.

I substituted raw cocoa nibs for the melted chocolate and chopped up goji berries and crystallised ginger as small as I could, as time unmercifully ticked by.

The scales were the sort that helpfully mark weights like 200g with a bold black stripe but leave the lesser 50g ones to your imagination.

I folded in the ground almonds, the raw chocolate, the melted butter (I thought I’d better melt something), the chopped berries and ginger into the eggs, whisked, with an invented amount of rapadura sugar.

My cake tin was too large so I filled it with water and placed a smaller one inside it. I forgot to grease the smaller one or the knowledge that cake tins are not watertight. I gave my concoction 30 minutes in a Gas Mark six oven and served it with local organic clotted cream from the other wonderful organic shop in my life, Marshford, in North Devon.

And miraculously, the cake was a winner. The combination of crunchy raw cocoa, goji berries and ginger was exotic. (Although a less hot oven might have made the almonds moister).

Synchronistically, on the same day, a fellow food blogger was making a similar cake, whose recipe I most heartily commend.