A healthy bakeover for Beetroot and Chocolate cake

We love making the Phenomenal Dark Chocolate Beetroot cake from Abel & Cole's recipe book. We've tried various versions of beetroot and chocolate cake but this one usually turns out the best. I think by whisking the egg whites separately and then folding them in helps prevent the cake feeling too 'heavy' although it still has a yummy gooey fudgey texture to it.

I wanted to see if I could keep all the taste but make it a healthier option, so here's our adapted version. We are using roughly the same technique but have made a few changes to the ingredients by swapping out the butter for a combination of yogurt and margarine as well as reducing the amount of sugar and chocolate. Here's our version:

Ingredients:
200g pureed beetroot (boil then peel and puree)
1 tsp fresh ginger (the Abel and Cole recipe uses 1 tablespoon but I wasn't sure if the kids would like that much)
130g dark chocolate
125g Plain flour
1 and a half tsp baking powder
pinch salt
3 eggs separated
100g Stork
100g Plain yogurt (I used my homemade yogurt that I've been making lately)
100g caster sugar

Method:
1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Grease and line an 8 inch tin.
2. break the chocolate into chunks and whilst the oven is pre-heating pop it in the oven in a heat-proof bowl for just a few minutes to melt. Pop the beetroot puree in a separate dish in the oven to warm through slightly for a few minutes too.
3. Mix together the beetroot, chocolate and ginger and leave to one side.
4. Next sift the other dry ingredients together into a bowl.
5. Whisk the egg yolks, Stork, yogurt and sugar. This started to separate a little so I added in a little of the flour at this stage.
6. Whisk the egg whites until stiff.
7. Now it's time to combine the 3 mixtures by folding carefully - First fold in the flour into the egg yolk mixture, then fold in the egg whites, then finally carefully fold in the beetroot / chocolate mixture.
8. Pour into the cake tin and bake in the oven for 50 minutes (check after 40 minutes and adjust time if necessary - in my oven 50 minutes was the perfect time).


This tastes amazing on it's own but to add a little extra sweetness you can ice it with a buttercream or cream cheese frosting.

We used a mix of butter and cream cheese with icing sugar and a touch of vanilla extract. The quantities were 260g icing sugar, 75g butter, 75g cream cheese, half a tsp vanilla extract.

I think it would also taste great with a Chocolate Cream Cheese frosting like the one we made here.

Orange or lemon zest on top as a garnish looks great or you could decorate with chocolate sprinkles.