Chocolate Beetroot cake

On Friday I made the recipe from BBC Good Food for blitz and bake chocolate and beetroot cake was really interesting in the way the ingredients were put together and resulted in a lovely purple tinged chocolate cake. Perhaps my oven is hotter as I think the 1 hour cooking time was too long.

Still it was a good cake, sticky and moist with a slight earthy flavour mingled in with the cocoa and chocolate nibs. The following day it was even more moist and Phil and the kids had some on Sunday warmed up slightly with ice cream. It became more of a chocolate brownie cake by the end of the weekend.

Thank you to friends and family for sending other beetroot recipes. The Channel Four eat yourself thin recipe was popular and I might try it next time.

Also this weekend I had a lovely time buying some goodies for my cup cake course in two weeks. I found a non stick rolling pin, bigger icing nozzles, icing smoother and side scraper and gel icing colours from Lakeland. I'm going to have to practise this weekend with piping again and coloured icing.

On a different cooking note, I've got into chinese/thai style soups recently and have making this incredibly simple, fresh tasting yummy soups for mid week meals. The naughty bit is the won ton or dim sum dumplings which I can't resist but with a basis of miso soup they're really healthy. For once, when Hannah came over to stay on Friday, we ditched the usual take away and had the home made soup. Delicious.

And on a non-food note, I made this card for Phil's neice inspired by photomontage/collage work of artists as varied as Richard Hamilton, Claudine Hellmuth and of course the children's favourite, Lauren Child. I also think there's a bit of Henri Rousseau in there too.