Red velvet cakes have always intrigued me, but I’ve never made them because the idea of using artificial poisons coloring had never inspired, au contraire, it has in fact killed my desire to make this cake. The other day I found myself wondering how to use those three beetroots that have been lying in my refrigerator for some days and suddenly everything just clicked together.
I have a special relationship with beetroots, of love and hate. I’ve been suffering of anemia for more than ten years already and, besides taking iron pills, I’ve tried from the beginning to integrate in my diet all the food containing iron. As a matter of fact, mussels contain a lot of iron, but irony wants me to be allergic to them, so they’ve always been off the list. Spinaches, dark chocolate, pulses were integral part of my everyday meals, and beetroots too. I’ve eaten so many kilos of beetroots in my teenage years that I guess I got a little sick of them.
Sometimes I still enjoy making a beets & potato salad with fresh parsley (a perfect side dish, believe me!), but there are days when my brain just refuses to think of eating beetroots. So, for this cake, I definitely did not want the beets’ taste to come up strongly, but I wanted to hide it as much as possible. The solution was found in my faithful cocoa powder, that pushed the beets somewhere in the background. Now, I used dark cocoa powder and for that reason the color did not turn out to be as vibrant as I wanted it to be. If you instead would use raw cacao powder, the red from the beets would show more.
Last week we had celebrated with Klaus our two and a half years wedding anniversary and definitely this is the kind of cake that would fit perfectly to a special occasion or anniversary.
For this cake I used two 11,5 cm (4 ½ inch) pans. What to do if you don’t have such mini pans? Well, you have several options:
- Double the ingredients and use two bigger pans
- Use a bigger pan and the same amount of ingredients and make a two layer cake
- Buy two small pans (smaller cakes look cute, it’s easier to frost them, serve many people because the are so tall and are still small enough to finish without fearing diabetes)
Did you know? By opening the recipe on Yum, you are able to see the recipe in US measurements 🙂
- 250 g beetroots
- 1 tbsp (15 ml) water
- 2 eggs
- 100 g sugar
- 120 g all purpose flour or rice flour
- 60 g butter
- 15 cacao or cocoa powder
- ½ tsp baking powder
- ½ tsp baking soda
- 200 ml heavy cream
- 300 g cream cheese
- 1 g vanilla sugar
- 2 tbsp (30 ml) water
- ½ tsp rose petals
- 1 ½ tbsp(45 g) honey
- Wash and peel the beetroots. Wrap them in folio paper and bake them in oven at 200°C (395F) until soft (it will take between 1½ to 2 hours depending on the size of your beetroots).
- Blend the beetroots with the water until they will be completely pureed.
- In a bowl, mix well the beets puree, the eggs, the sugar and the butter.
- Add little by little the flour, the cocoa powder, the baking powder and soda and mix until the batter will be smooth and homogeneous.
- Grease two 11,5 cm (4 ½ inch) springform pans and divide the batter equally between the pans.
- Bake at 175°C (350F) for 40 minutes or until a toothpick will come out of the batter completely clean.
- Boil the water and pour it in a glass with the rose petals and the honey. Mix and let it infuse for about 15 minutes.
- Whip the cream till firm, add the cream cheese and the vanilla sugar and whip still.
- With a sieve, filter the rose water and add it to the frosting. Whip still for a few seconds.
- Once cooled, remove the cakes from the pans, level them out and cut them lengthwise into two with the help of a break knife.
- Place the first of four disks on a plate, cover it with some frosting and repeat the process until you’ll have used all the disks.
- Frost the cake with the remaining frosting. Refrigerate the cake for 20/30 minutes before frosting it if it feels unstable.
- Decorate by blowing rose petals on the cake.
