We share our mothers health

My grandmother turned 84 on Monday. 84. I can't imagine where I'll be at 30, never mind living into my 80s. Maybe everything will evolve radically and it'll be normal to live well beyond that, although I am not someone who would want to live forever.

Because she lives at the coast and we live about 14h by car away from her I was not thinking about baking her a cake. But then my aunt decided to fly down, and suddenly we had to fashion some last minute red velvet cupcakes to go along for a trip to the coast. I am not the biggest fan of red velvet, because it's basically a fake chocolate cupcake with cream cheese frosting. Rather give me chocolate on chocolate, not the fake red stuff. I have tried making a red velvet cake using beetroot as colourant, which worked, but still I wouldn't do it again. However, these were requested, so I made them.

Again, the recipe is shamelessly stolen from Nigella Lawson, although I substituted yoghurt for the buttermilk, added 2TB of red food colouring (not the paste, the liquid kind) and made up the frosting as I went along.

Here are the results:

Beet me

Tomorrow is a birthday in the house, so we had a brunch today for which cake was needed. A friend and I recently baked a red velvet cake, which is why a red-velvet-cheesecake sounded even better. Instead of using fake food colouring I thought the colour from the beets would make it equally red. Alas, no. Whatever. It still tastes quite nice. Not sure if red velvet will ever become my favourite, but it is worth trying different recipes and  finding out which ones are a success and which ones should rather not be tried again. 

You can find the recipe on Recipe Girl, the cheesecake itself is quite delicious. Instead of the red food colouring, I baked four beets in the oven with the cheesecake ( saving energy and preserving more colour than when boiled), then I peeled their skins of, cut them in small pieces and puree-d them. It helped to add a teaspoon or so of water. I guess that if you want the cake a proper red, go for the food colouring. But if you have some objection to fake colouring, go for the beet. You don't taste it too much, but the cake looks more brown than red due to the cocoa powder that is added. I wonder if one could leave out the cocoa and just add the beets? Or would the flavour then be too strong? Hmm.