Beet Season Birthday Cake

It’s beet season. Time to celebrate the plant that cooled Roman fevers, sustained Marie Curie’s education, and inspired one of the more memorable American novels of the past twenty-five years.*

This particular beet season Tuesday is also the birthday of our own illustrious Kenny Bloggins, our President, Shaker CJ_in_VA, and my nephew N. (UPDATE: Xerophyte points out in comments that it is also Helen Thomas's birthday, and Obama gave her cupcakes).




Good thing I made a beet birthday cake:


Beet chocolate cake with chocolate-coffee glaze and slivered almonds. Recipe by Harry Eastwood, though she garnishes hers with fresh rose petals. Photo by SKM


This recipe appeared recently on the Lifetime network's cringeworthy Cook Yourself Thin (CYT). I watched CYT initially because I recognized one of the chefs, Candice Kumai, from Season One of Top Chef.

I have mixed feelings about Cook Yourself Thin, to say the least. The chefs are highly skilled, the recipes are simple and practical and the food ends up looking pretty tasty. However, CYT is sexist. Harry Eastwood’s bio written for the UK version of the show breaks its back trying to downplay her competence, and that mood permeates the U.S. version as well. The chefs refer to one another as "girls". And in the CYT universe, women do all the cooking. CYT is also classist: it assumes that everyone can simply replace prepared foods with fresh alternatives made at home, ignoring the access issues Melissa has written about before. Worst of all, CYT unquestionably makes food into a moral issue. “Sinful”, “shameful”, “without guilt” and “virtuous” are some common food descriptors on CYT. Furthermore, the CYT chefs mingle this language of sin with the language of science (e.g. by putting up calculations on the screen for how many calories a given client is “allowed” to eat per day in order to achieve her virtuous weight loss). Thus, the show is directly in line with the faux-rational fat-hating that leads to nonsense like "sin" taxes on "bad" foods.

But I had beets, the need for a cake, and a lot of curiosity, so I cringed through the moralizing and took down Harry Eastwood's recipe. I was intrigued: can you replace butter with grated raw beets in a cake batter and get an acceptable texture? What will the color be like? Will beets’ earthy bitterness support the coffee and chocolate, or overwhelm them?

In short, you can replace butter with beets, though I think the cake's tenderness would be improved by two tablespoons of melted butter folded into the batter at the last second, as with a genoise.


The color looks like this before the cocoa/flour mixture is added, but pretty much like a regular cocoa-based chocolate cake after baking.

But the flavor is the really clever part. Coffee and dark chocolate both have pronounced bitter notes, which envelop the bitterness of the beets quite well. In turn, the sweet earthy taste of the beets adds a subtle complexity without standing out as "beety". My partner, who will not accept sweetened vegetables in any form (no carrot cake, no pumpkin pie, no zucchini bread), pronounced the cake a triumph and even had it for breakfast this morning. I failed to mention the beets to him, and I hope he won't be too shocked upon reading this.

For the cake:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and prepare a 10-inch spring-form pan by lining it with baking parchment.

dry ingredients:
¼ cup ground almonds (I ground blanched almonds in the food processor)
1 ½ cups self-rising flour
5 Tablespoons Dutch-process cocoa powder

wet ingredients:
3 eggs
¾ cup sugar
4 oz. raw beet, peeled and finely grated
4 oz. low-fat buttermilk
2 Tablespoons strong coffee
1 teaspoon vanilla extract


N.B. I don’t have any self-rising flour, so I mixed my own from all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt: 1 ½ teaspoons of aluminum-free baking powder and ½ teaspoon salt per cup of flour. I use aluminum-free baking powder because it does not have the potentially bitter, tinny taste of regular baking powder. I used Rumford.

Combine dry ingredients and stir well.

In a separate bowl, beat eggs with sugar until very light, almost to a ribbon but not quite (5-7 minutes on medium speed if you have an electric mixer). Add the beets and combine well. Add the buttermilk, coffee, and vanilla. Finally, add the dry ingredients, mixing well but not over-working the batter. Pour into the prepared pan and bake at 350F for 30 minutes. Cool on a rack for 10-15 minutes before unmolding.

for the chocolate glaze:

Melt in a double boiler or in a heatproof bowl over a pan of hot (not boiling) water:
½ cup dark chocolate

Stir in vigorously:

2 Tablespoons strong coffee
2 tablespoons honey

Working with chocolate can be tricky. If you add enough liquid and stir vigorously, the glaze should be fine. For more about tempering chocolate and adding liquid to it, see chocomap's info. For more on the physics of chocolate, see Cosmic Variance.

the watercolor at the top of the post is by Sally Jacobs.

*Tom Robbins writes his novels by picking a first sentence and going from there, one sentence at a time. Here is how he begins his fourth novel:

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

--Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984