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

Gettin’ bloggie with it!

If you’ve kept an eye on the sorella & me facebook page over the last few days you would have seen that Anna and I were fortunate to spend two days at the ProBlogger Training Event in Melbourne – getting our bloggie on!! The event brings 300 bloggers of all levels together to learn and network.

Anna and I really enjoy writing the sorella-hood blog and connecting with you all here, sharing our observations on ‘life’, and hopefully providing you a place to have a laugh (at our expense) or learn something new.  We were grateful for the opportunity to find out how do this better by attending the ProBlogger training – it was such a treat to take some time out to listen and learn from the experts in the country… as experts on blogging we certainly are not!

What we perhaps enjoyed the most was meeting lots of fabulous people in the blogging game. Many who have amazing stories to share, are very clever, and are very very funny!

So for a little round-up of our experience, we thought you might like to know a little more about who these people are that dedicate such a big part of their lives writing…. What are bloggers all about?

Here’s what we reckon:

1. Bloggers are generous & inspiring.

They have great advice and experience and are willing to share with others with open arms.  This is unheard of in many areas of life – You rarely have experts in their field so willing to help others succeed. It was incredibly refreshing.

One of the ProBlogger panel of speakers: From left to right, Eden Riley of Edenland; Mrs Woog; of Woogsworld and Lorraine Murphy from blogging agency The Remarkables Group

2. Bloggers feel like old friends

Bloggers feel like good friends you’ve known for ages. They are real people with real stories and they make it easy for you to feel a connection with them. We ‘know’ many virtually and it was wonderful to finally meet them in person, including Nikki from Styling You.

There were lots of chatting ops (usually over lots of food…See point 4)

3. Bloggers have great hair.

Guilt and sugar free sweet stuff

There seems to be heaps in the media lately about the benefits of quitting sugar, and while I think we all get why reducing your sugar intake is a good thing, there is a lot of new evidence that suggests we should be quitting all together.

This isn’t a new concept to me.  I’ve been trying to break up with sugar for the past 4 years – but we keep making up – it needs me and I need it. Like a true addict I can’t be without ‘my drug’.  It’s why I have a soft spot for smokers – I ‘get’ how it feels to try and give up something you love that you know is bad for you….(Note to smokers: don’t smoke, it’s really bad for you).

But back to my story – it was recommended I cut all sugar (along with a few other nasties) to help improve my immune system and allergies. I think I spent most of my 20’s severely lacking energy, constantly sick, and during my lowest points I’d head straight to my friend chocolate to get me through an afternoon of work to avoid falling asleep at my desk. It was ridiculous – and it turns out this momentary spark of alertness was doing more damage than good. Poison even. It’s so funny how doing something you think is helping you to survive the day is actually having a far greater negative effect on you in other ways.

So I have tried (and failed over and over again – damn you big supermarkets for stocking Easter eggs from January!) to end my long lustful relationship with sugar. But as my health plummeted again at the end of last year, I realised my only option was to get focused and stay as committed as possible.

Luckily, I was able to feel more confident in my last-ditch attempt given the increase in resources for quitting this past 12 months – there is LOTS more info out there both online and in print that provide great guidance and support with staying off the sweet stuff for good. Plus, there seems to be greater accessibility to many products that provide good sugar alternatives. It was dire trying to find a natural sweetener 4 years ago. Today, I can’t get enough of Rice Malt Syrup and there are plenty of other natural sugar alternatives on the market to allow me to continue to do things like bake – which was one of the things I struggled to give up and was pretty much always the cause of my sugar-free failings. I can’t help that I love making my late Grandmother’s recipes, as laden with sugar that they are! And let’s face it, if you have a sweet tooth, you are probably always going to always be more drawn to the sweeter types of food – so being able to enjoy these sweet treats passed down from generations can still be achieved with a few modifications of ingredients. Probably nothing new to our Gluten or Dairy free folk out there.

So I thought today I would share a ridiculously simple recipe that I have come across in Sarah Wilson’s cookbook I Quit Sugar (which you can purchase online here). Sarah is a big advocate for quitting sugar, and probably has a lot to do with its recent promotion through mainstream media.  I have mentioned how much I love her blog before, and her guidance for quitting sugar is just one additional reason to get on her blog bandwagon. Not only does she have her cookbook – which is full of really easy recipes – she has also put together an 8 week program to give those of us who need a kick up the behind when it comes to committing and quitting.

And a little tip – She talks about increasing fats in our diets as key for staying off sugar, but I will let you check this info out (which there is plenty) on her blog for more on this. All I will say is – hello bacon!

The recipe I am sharing today is a great go-to treat. Not too sweet to get me thinking about a 200g block of Green & Blacks Organic Milk Chocolate, but perfect for helping me at 3pm when I’m getting tired and restless. I reckon this will be a great afternoon tea treat for kidlets too and will be testing it out on Alisha’s 2 little ones when they visit me in Melbourne later this month (but maybe without the salt and nibs). Enjoy!

SARAH WILSON’S ALMOND BUTTER BARK

INGREDIENTS (certified organic where possible!)

I’m chicken of chicken

Sometimes I look at raw chicken and I think: You look weird. You look a bit too complex. You look like you should have your feathers on. You look cold & miserable. Clinically depressed even. I’m sorry, but I just can’t handle you (physically or mentally)…

After 12 months of living & working in Vietnam, you would think I would be good a handling birds. It was a daily occurrence for the girls from the house opposite mine to be out on the footpath, squatting down with their machetes chopping their bird of choice – preparing it for any number of dishes for the day.

Bird for breaky. Bird for lunch. Bird for dinner.

But over-exposure in this way didn’t help how chicken I was of chicken.  Especially because at the time, the non-profit I was working for was running a Bird Flu prevention program. There was just too much bird in my day, every day – and it made me icky.

The closest thing to a chicken I can cope with is Foghorn Leghorn – he’s a rooster! image via warner brothers