Blend-and-bake beetroot chocolate cake

After last week’s beetroot pasta recipe, people might start to think I’m becoming obsessed. The banal reality is that I needed to use up some leftover cooked beetroot from Asda! But I defend my decision to run two weeks in a row of beetroot recipes – cooked beetroot is cheap from most supermarkets and as well as being great for savoury dishes such as pasta sauces, risottos and beetroot and goat cheese tarts, it adds a richness and depth to chocolate cakes, especially if you use dark chocolate cocoa.

Even those who think beetroot is interchangeable with Satan’s fuchsia testicles will have their minds and tastebuds turned by this easy cake.

The beetroot is simply blended with the wet ingredients to form a smooth, pink paste, mixed in with the dry ingredients for a thick, gloopy batter and baked.   If you don’t have a blender or a food processor, fear not. The pink paste can be made with a little extra elbow grease. After all, our ancestors made cakes for centuries without the help of electrical appliances. I would suggest donning an apron and gloves and chopping up the beetroot into very small pieces and mashing with a potato masher before mixing well with the other wet ingredients, either by hand or with an electric mixer.

For the frosting, it is basically the cream cheese frosting I use on my lemon and blueberry ripple cake, minus the lemon juice and sour cream, but you can add a couple of tablespoons of cocoa powder for a rich chocolate frosting. I won’t lie, I went for a cream cheese frosting minus the chocolate mostly for a bit of aesthetic contrast in the photo on Twitter!