I’ve always thought that brownies are a grown-up excuse to eat raw cake mixture – a cursory nod to the oven gives them baked-goods legitimacy, just as a whiff of the martini bottle is the grown-up excuse to down a large bucket of gin. This version with beetroot is, of course, just another such excuse – put a healthy ingredient in your cake mix, and gorge without guilt! I jumped on the River Cottage bandwagon last week, and made these chocolate brownies with grated beetroot and beetroot ice-cream. I can tell you that they’re delicious, as long as you like beetroot. There’s no getting away from the earthy taste even in the brownies, as it comes out in the slightly undercooked centre of the brownie pan. I really liked eating them together, the ice-cream with its extraordinary fuchsia colour contrasting with the savoury/sweet brownie. Next time I would puree the beetroot well for the brownies and for the ice-cream use slightly less of the root than stipulated in the recipe, possibly adding some chocolate chips to the just-churned mixture. Overall, a success, but not one to convince beetroot-avoiders. (Oh, by the way, if you’re a surreptitious snacker, these brownies will tinge your guilty fingers pink…)
I’d never heard of kasutera before reading this post from Teochew, but it is light as a feather (as it has no added fat other than eggs and milk) and well worth a bit of whisking in front of the hob – a good BBC Radio 4 podcast and an electric whisk are essential. Imagine a honey-flavoured zabaione batter, eggs whisked into voluminous lusciousness, thickened with a little flour, baked, glazed with more honey and then chilled overnight to become moist and even fluffier. Simple, absolutely delicious and well worth the bit of time involved.
Nigella’s Christmas Cookies are deceptively simple – just the usual suspects of butter, sugar, flour and cocoa modged together and splodged into little balls on a baking sheet. They come out of the oven crackled like the surface of an oil painting, and once glazed have the sheen of a just-varnished masterpiece. Sprinkles optional.
