Chilli and beetroot red velvet cakes

I am discovering that there are certain advantages to being single: you are no longer ruled by your mobile phone; you don't have to rush, or even look at the time; you can watch anything you want on TV; and you have the freedom to eat red velvet cakes for dinner, if you so please. Tonight, I so pleased. As you have probably realized due to the lack of cakes on this blog, I do not bake often. I dislike measuring ingredients and being precise. With cakes, you need to measure, as I have learnt through many bad experiences

I first ate red velvet cakes a few months ago, when my friend from work brought them in. As she is now on a diet, I can't rely on her to make them anymore, and this is why I have had to venture into cake making territory myself. I have adapted two recipes for this - the cake itself is from the Green'n'Blacks chocolate cookbook, whereas the icing is from the Hummingbird bakery. I wanted to use the beetroot to colour the cakes in order to make them healthier, but they turned out less red and more brown. My own tweek to this recipe is using chilli chocolate, as well as adding a pinch of chilli powder, which gives it a bit of a kick. You start off by preheating the oven to gas mark 180/ gas mark 4. Sift together the drinking chocolate and flour, mixing in the sugar. Melt the chocolate and butter together and puree the beets. Whisk the eggs, then add the beets. Add the chocolate and beet mixture into the dry ingredients and keep whisking/blending. Now, all the recipes say to bake this for 50 minutes, but mine were ready after 40min. For the icing, mix the butter in with the icing thoroughly, then add the cream cheese and blend. I used the whisk for this. Once the cakes had cooled, I used a spatula to cover them in icing, putting the the mini marshmallows on top, as decoration. You will need to use either quite strong cups or double up, so they don't get too out of shape. I doubled up, but as you can see they still got slightly deformed. Next time, I will definitely use hardcore, strong cups, so that they look even prettier. I may even get a special tray...

Ingredients:

100g drinking chocolate

230g self raising flour

200g caster sugar

100g dark chocolate (with chilli is possible)

125g slightly salted butter

250g cooked beetroot

3 large eggs

Pinch of chilli powder

Icing:

300g icing sugar

50g butter

150g cream cheese

Mini marshmallows

By the way, this recipe makes about a million cakes. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but more than 24 anyhow, so you may want to halve it if you do not want that many...