Beetroot Chocolate Cake

Today I completed a food-related goal from The List:

075. Make something delicious using something I usually hate the taste of

I opted for making beetroot chocolate cake, as I'd planned all along.

Now let me tell you, ordinarily, I can't stand beetroot.

I hate the smell of it, cannot bear the taste of it, and honestly the only thing it's got going for it is the colour. But you can't eat colour.

You can, however, eat cake.

I used this chocolate beetroot cake recipe from Allrecipes.co.uk, though I didn't bother with the vanilla essence, and swapped out the plain flour/bicarbonate of soda for self raising flour...and completely forgot about the salt. Oh well.

My cookery skills are pretty chaotic and messy, and I didn't have a tin the right size so I ended up making a big cake and six cupcakes. The big cake took forever to cook through--about 25 mins longer than the recipe said! I think I put too much mix in the tin...

After letting the cakes cool, I covered them in chocolate ganache. I didn't realise how simple it was to make! The most complicated parts are chopping up the chocolate and making sure the cream doesn't boil.

Covered the cupcakes in little decorations just to use them up. I had way too much ganache left so ended up making two little desserts in ramekin dishes, with the leftover ganache on top of broken up digestive biscuits, which Dad and I ate for pudding, with the leftover double cream!

As for the beetroot cake itself, I've only eaten one of the cupcakes so far, but enjoyed it! The cake tasted extremely chocolatey, and I couldn't taste any beetroot at all :)

So mission accomplished, but it was so chocolately I don't think I'll need chocolate for another month!

A Complete Pair

Things That Hurt When You Tread on Them

At the start of the year, I tentatively declared my photography project, A Strange Pair, finished. There was still one more photo I wanted to take for it, but I'd been unable to get my hands on one of the objects I wanted for it, and had reached my goal of 21 photos.

So I called it finished and forgot about it.

Sometimes forgetting about things is all you need for serendipity to throw what you want into your path, because whilst volunteering the other day, I came across a little Lego kit.
It had one brick of the size I wanted.
And it was the colour I wanted, too.

So at long last, I was able to take the stupid photo: Things That Hurt When You Tread on Them.

This project is finally complete! 

There are now 22 photos altogether, each one featuring two objects paired for unconventional reasons. This is based on information I found in a book on psychology, relating to the way a group of schizophrenics categorised objects (see my post Stop! for more information).
I found this utterly fascinating, so explored the idea of unconventional categories through this project. Thinking outside of the box for pairs/categorisations was as challenging as finding that damn Lego block...

And now it's done!
This counts towards goal 12: Complete 3 photography projects, along with my still in-progress project, State of Mind.
One down, one and a half to go!

See all photos taken for A Strange Pair here.