Chocolate Beet Cake

There are a lot of great things about having a CSA share. When you sign up for a weekly share you're supporting local farmers and sustainable farming; you get quality produce at a cheaper price than you could find in a grocery store; and each week you get to bring home delicious foods like seedy whole wheat breads, raw cheese, and sweet corn, that might not have found their way into your kitchen otherwise. For all the wonderful things that come with it, the one drawback of a CSA share is that you also can get stuck with produce that you really don't want. And then you have to find ways to use up all of the fresh fennel, or the eggplant, or the stalks of edamame that you signed up for.

For us, the greatest challenge has been finding ways to use the steady supply of red beets we've received this summer.

As a kid I had the shock of mistaking roasted beets for slices of my beloved canned cranberry sauce at a Thanksgiving dinner - that night some part of my subconscious was forever scarred by that alien root. But when they started popping up in our vegetable drawer this summer the trauma had faded from memory and I really had no aversion to trying them again. I topped a pizza with caramelized onions, walnuts, chèvre and small wedges of the roasted beet; we quickly decided that none of us liked the beets and had to pick every one of them off just to salvage our dinner. 

As beets continued to come in each week it became evident that the only way to swallow a beet was in very small portions smothered by other, better flavors. I enjoyed the same pizza with a sprinkling of grated beet and found that golden beets are nicely camoflauged inside of a muffin. So I hatched a plan to take down this weeks store in a chocolate (red beet) cake!