Get your velvet on – beetroot style!

Did you see Alisha’s post on the sorella & me facebook page yesterday in all its sugary goodness?

Alisha’s perfect and delicious cup cake…. jealous much?

Right at 3pm – in all our dropped blood-sugar states – she thought she’d share a photo of a delicious cupcake.

What a bi-atch.

In my opinion, not only was it rude because it was at a time when a cup cake would have gone down quite nicely (I am cranky when I am hungry), but also rude because there are many of us who are trying really really hard to convert to a sugar-free lifestyle – and succeeding or not, we don’t need a reminder of what we are missing out on!

So I hit Sarah Wilson’s latest sugar free cookbook for some inspiration to compete with my now very real and very present sweet cravings. I have unapologetically pushed my love for Sarah on you numerous times – see here and here for examples – and it’s crises like these that support my reason why.

And whoalah! I found an option I knew would come close to providing some sort of cake relief – and I just happened to have a couple of beautiful organic beets in the fridge ready for the taking. Now…. be open minded to a vegetable based cake. No one likes a vege-ist.  And anyway, you like carrot cake right?

I present:

Beetroot Red Velvet Cupcakes – from Sarah Wilson’s I Quit Sugar – Chocolate Cookbook

(And double bonus – they can also be gluten and dairy free if you need…..)

Ingredients (all organic where possible peeps!)

• 2 large beetroot – grated
• 1 & 1/2 cups almond meal
• 4 tablespoons raw cacao powder*
• 3 tablespoons of coconut oil
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla powder**
• 1/4 cup rice malt syrup***
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking powder (Gluten free)
• Pinch of Salt

For the icing – if you aren’t sugar free, you could do a normal icing.  If you aren’t dairy free you could do a philly cream cheese icing (aka banana or carrot cake).  If you are sugar and dairy free you could do a coconut cream or cashew cream icing (these recipes are also in Sarah’s book).

My variations:*

* You can never have enough chocolatey goodness – Call me crazy but I added an extra couple of tablespoons of cacao.  This meant I also needed to up the wet ingredients so added a touch more oil

** I can’t justify having vanilla powder in my cupboard – but open to invest in the future as many of Sarah’s recipes include it. So in this instance, it was a teaspoon of vanilla extract for me.

*** Taste the batter before you commit to the oven! If it’s not sweet enough add some more rice malt syrup. Everyone’s tastebuds are different and especially with the earthiness of the beets, you might want to up the sweet stuff to more easily convince friends afraid of a sugarless lifestyle and wary of your vegetables moonlighting as cup cakes.

The super pretty redness of the beetroot make this cake mix look more like a science experiment… but a delicious one.

Method:

Preheat oven to 170degs and grease a 12 cupcake tin. Blend together in a blender (or go crazy with a stick-blender, thermomix, food-processer…. whatever floats your boat), until nice and smooth.  Divide between the 12 cake tin and pop into the oven.

Sarah suggests baking for 40 mins (my non-fan-forced oven meant 160degs for me for just 25 minutes. BAM! That’s chocolate goodness in less time than an episode of Bold and the Beautiful…. I can’t believe Liam didn’t choose Hope by the way. Idiot.)

My little baby in all its red-guilt-free-glory:Enjoy!

~ anna