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!
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.)
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.
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.
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Winner of the 2016 Bony Blithe Award! |
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Now hear this! |
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and Victoria Abbott
Don't be a stranger! 💘💘💘
and Victoria Abbott
Don't be a stranger! 💘💘💘
Fabulous cupcake recipe and books! EMS591@aol.com
ReplyDeleteThanks, Liz (NoVeggieGirl). And you never taste them. Thanks for coming by and good luck.
DeleteMy mother loved beets. My father loved beets. Me, not so much. But I can see that they'd keep your cupcakes moist and add an interesting twist to the flavor.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sheila. They do and they don't overwhelm the cocoa, so people never guess. Have fooled everyone so far!
Delete