Beet Cake

The idea of a beet cake may strike you as strange. I know -- it sounded a bit odd to me, too, at first. But I have taken the plunge and made a cake whose featured ingredient is grated beet root.

Let me tell you how I lost my mind one morning and created what I thought was a novel idea and how it led me to discover that even our most creative ideas are often not all that unique at all.

It began on Valentine's Day morning a couple of years ago. My husband is a registered nurse and so has an erratic schedule. He works twelve hour shifts, sometimes during the day and sometimes all night long. This particular Valentine's Day he was due home after an all night hospital shift and would be off for a few days before his next series of shifts would resume.

Now we all have favorite breakfast treats. My husband's happens to be pancakes. I thought I would surprise him on Valentine's morning with hot pancakes when he came though the door. But how was I to make them extra special for Valentine's Day? I would try to make them in the shape of a heart, of course, but I wanted to do something more than that. Why, I thought, I'll make them red, or at least pink! I had no berries in the house, so I used what I had on hand, which happened to be a couple of beets. I grated a beet into the pancake batter, and presto -- pink pancakes!

My husband was so delighted with his pink pancakes, and with their interesting flavor, that when his next birthday came around, he asked if I would make him a beet birthday cake.

Everyone has heard of carrot cake by now, with its spicy flavor and with its little flecks of orange in the cake. The beet cake I made for my husband was similar to carrot cake, only instead of flecks of orange, it had flecks of deep red. In fact, to make the cake, I took a carrot cake recipe I had and substituted grated beet root for the grated carrot.

The results were surprisingly good, and our family actually prefers beet cake now to carrot cake. The color is really pretty.

Later I discovered that people have been making cakes with beet root for long time. Beets can actually be quite sweet and in fact, are the source for sugar in many places. During the Great Depression in the 1930's people often used boiled beets to color their cakes. The famous "red velvet cake," popular then and offered as the specialty dessert in Canada's Eaton department store bakeries, was made with boiled beets. Beets helped retain the moisture in cakes and added to the red coloring in devil's food cakes. Chocolate cakes were often made with a reddish tinge -- hence the name "devil's food cake" -- because the acid of the vinegar and buttermilk reacted to the cocoa in the cake. Sometimes cooks would add beets to enhance this reddish color. 

So my use of beets in a cake was not so new of an idea after all. Beets continue to be an ingredient in red velvet cake today. Bakeries will often include a red velvet cake or red velvet cupcake to their list of available cakes.

I am eager to try a red velvet cake recipe sometime. However, I still think my own recipe that uses grated beets is a good one, too.

Basically, you can substitute beets for carrots in any carrot cake recipe, but the link below will bring you to a Squidoo lens where I've revealed my own special beet cake recipe.

There's another carrot cake recipe there, too.

Let me know below whether you've tried it.

My family looks forward to the next time I make it . . . well, maybe on Valentine's Day!

Beet Cake, Carrot Cake, Zucchini Cake
Eat your veggies for dessert. Who says cake can't be good for you as well as taste delicious?