Your Cheatin’ Heart: yummy chocolate-beet cupcakes #recipe #veggie #giveaway @AbbottMysteries

Well Valentine’s Day is just around the corner and here WE are with our on-going veggie challenge. What to do???

Don’t forget to leave a comment to be in the draw for the veggie platter shown below!

There's no way we'll give up on our challenge yet and yet, there’s something about that special day that calls out for chocolate treat with a special sweetie, family or friends. 

Could we cheat and have it all?  Although we’d never had one, we had heard of chocolate cakes with beets and that seemed to us to be just the right kind of compromise. To spur ourselves on, we raced out and bought some new gear.  

We waded through recipes and couldn’t find one that had everything we wanted (like that nearly full container of buttermilk) so we mixed and matched and made things up. Do you do that too?

At any rate, the results sounded alarming to the little mister, but even he had to agree the finished product was excellent. 

Chocolate-Beet Cupcakes

Ingredients: 
 
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour (We also experimented with a blend of flour and oat hull fiber and they were--surprisingly-just as good. You may not believe this and we understand.)

½ cup best quality cocoa: we used Penzey’s for a potent punch!

1 ¼ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

 ½ tsp salt

1 cup sugar

2/3 cup canola oil

1 extra-large egg, room temperature

1 14 oz can sliced or diced red beets, drained and pureed in food processor

1 ½ tsp good quality vanilla

1 1/2 tbsp cold coffee

2/3 cup buttermilk

Directions: 

Preheat oven to 350 F

Grease the muffin pan or use liners. 

Sift flour with cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa, and salt into a large bowl.

Beat the sugar and oil until smooth. Beat in egg, pureed beets, vanilla and coffee.

Beat in 1/3 flour mixture, followed by half the buttermilk until just blended. Repeat: flour, buttermilk, flour. Do not overbeat.

Fill muffin cups to ¾.   We had enough batter left over to make a small cake in a ramekin.  It didn’t last long enough to take a photo. Gobble. Oh well.  

Bake until a tester comes out clean, about 25 minutes.  

Cool on a rack.  Don’t ice until completely cool, one of many things we’ve learned the hard way.

Ice with butter-cream icing or chocolate cream cheese icing or chocolate ganache whatever frosting you love.

These cupcakes are rich and moist but not overly sweet and that suited us perfectly.  We found that they were better the second day and that means we’ll make them ahead in future. We froze a few and they thawed and were still good in taste and texture. We chose to use a cake decorator tip and make a butter cream rosette rather than ice them all over. You must be true to your own self.  Nudge nudge wink wink.

We hope you’ll savor these as much as we did. Invite your friends, light a few candles and enjoy!

And in case you have forgotten who we are:  Victoria Abbott is a collaboration between me: the artist and photographer Victoria Maffini and other me:  Victoria’s mother, Mary Jane Maffini.

Together, we write the award-winning Book Collector Mysteries. We love writing together and oddly enough, we have fun.   

 

Want to see the books? Here they are!  All are available in print, e-book and audio.

  

  

Winner of the 2016 Bony Blithe Award!

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