My 'au naturel' beet red velvet cupcakes with roasted chestnuts

Very vibrant red color from the freshly pureed beet.

 

 

Everyone, me included, goes gaga when we sees red velvet cakes. I've book-marked a few recipes to try baking them myself. But after some reading up about them, I realized that in order to attain that vibrant pretty red color, I have to add in about half bottle (about 1-2oz) of the red colorant. Whoa!!? Having worked with food colorant before, I know where they come from. The natural ones cost a bomb. Most of them are artificially made and there's a danger to them. Some kids get anaphylactic shock eating food that contains them. Since my cakes are gonna be shared with friends and with my lil' one, I didn't want to add in the red colorant. Then I continued searching until I come across this recipe, which contains the ingredients I wanted, natural colorant - beetroot! and I also wanted a recipe that uses oil instead of butter (to give it the light texture) but still uses buttermilk. And I'm absolutely pleased with this. It's super light and moist, and I couldn't taste the beet (I was afraid that the earthy taste of beet would be too overpowering, it wasn't!) I ended up giving almost all out to my friends, clients and left only 3 for myself, hubby and the lil' fella. Well, Christmas is about giving..

Here's the recipe adapted from here.

Ingredients (this recipe yields about 10cupcakes)

• 150g superfine flour
• 15g natural cocoa powder (don't use the Dutch processed ones)
• 1.5tsp natural baking powder (free from aluminium)
• 100g pureed beetroot (steamed and pureed)
• 1/2 tsp lemon juice (original recipe uses vinegar, but I realized the tang never comes through in my cake, can probably up this in future)
• 1/2 cup buttermilk (1/2 tbsp. lemon juice in 1/2 cup of full cream milk and let sit for 10min)
• 100g molasses sugar
• 130ml vegetable oil (I used virgin coconut oil)
• 1 egg
• scraped vanilla seeds from a pod
• about 3-4 roasted chestnuts (mine was from a package)

Method
1. Preheat oven to 165deg C (I used a toaster oven).
2. Sift dry ingredients and set aside.
3. Peel skin off beetroot and cut into cubes. Steam with about 3tbsp water. Puree in a blender.
4. Using a hand held beater, I combine the pureed beetroot with oil, lemon juice, vanilla and egg.
5. Add dry ingredients to the wet batter. Mix thoroughly.
6. Spoon batter into cupcake liners, till about 90% full (knew that this cupcake is not gonna rise much). Sprinkle with some chopped roasted chestnuts on top.
7. Bake for 18-20min or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
8. Let cool completely before icing with cream-cheese frosting.

Molasses cream-cheese frosting
(I don't have white icing sugar, I never use them. For all recipes I bake or cook with, I use molasses to replace the sugar. For icing sugar, I just replace with molasses sugar that I've blitz to fine powder)

• 70g butter, room temperature
• 120g cream cheese, room temperature
• 150g molasses sugar, sifted
• 1tsp pure vanilla extract

1. Beat butter and cream cheese until well combined.

2. Add in vanilla and sift in half of molasses icing and beat until combined. Then sift in the remaining sugar and mix until smooth and thick.



I'm submitting this post to Baby Sumo's Christmas Recipe Collection 2013 event, hosted by Baby Sumo of Eat Your Heart Out.