It's a favourite because it's super-easy, and uses cocoa instead of chocolate which means I almost always have the ingredients in the house. Chocolate doesn't tend to last that long.
I'm telling you about this today because I discovered an amazing thing at the weekend. You know there are recipes out there for chocolate beetroot cakes? Well there are, and they are good. And I had some beetroot in the veg box this week that seemed to want to be a cake.
But I had no chocolate (see above) so decided to try the brownie recipe with beetroot replacing the butter. I was not confident it would work; I rather suspected I would end up with a tray of what could best be described as sweet borscht.
So, full of no faith in my own abilities, I tried it anyway. And it worked! The end product was cake!
The eagle-eyed amongst you might spot that it's rather more cakey than brownie-y. You'd be right. Because of the borscht-fear I added a little more flour than the original recipe suggested (100g instead of 80g) and half a teaspoon of baking powder. It's still brownie rather than sponge, but not so fudgey. I'm now quite confident it'd work without added my added raising extras though, so I'll try that next time and report back.
I'm not going to go so far as to proclaim these healthy brownies, as there's still a fair whack of sugar in there. But there's no fat and you get an added extra of vegetable which can only be a good thing.
Anyone who wants to try this at home, I recommend you boil your beetroot until they're soft and blend into a puree. Then add the sugar and cocoa to the blender to get to the consistency suggested in the recipe before adding the eggs.
Oh my goodness! I am totally trying this at the earliest possible opportunity! How much beetroot did you use? The same weight as you'd usually use of butter?
ReplyDeleteExactly the same, once it was pureed. Let me know if you try it without the baking powder!
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