Chocolate Beetroot Cake

I mentioned in last week's post about beetroot that my next beetroot exploit would be chocolate beetroot cake. Here it is, in all its moist, chocolatey glory. A Google search turns up dozens of recipes, but in the end I opted for Nigel Slater's recipe from Tender: v. 1: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch.

I'm quite a fan of Slater, and this recipe is heavy on chocolate, using both melted chocolate and cocoa powder. This could could only be good. I also had a lot of eggs to use up; most of the recipes use only 3 eggs, but this one called for 5.

I diverged from the recipe slightly by adding more chocolate in the form of a ganache spread liberally over the top of the cake (I used chocolate with 70% cocoa solids, so there was no worry that the ganache would make it sickly sweet). I did take Slater's advice, however, and serve it with soured cream and poppy seeds. Delicious!

The recipe is also available online if you want to try it yourself. (Don't be misled by the photograph: for some reason they have printed a photograph of Slater's Beetroot Seed Cake from the same book, but the recipe is for the chocolate cake.)