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!