Beet Velvet Cupcakes

I have been wanting to give Red Velvet Cupcakes a shot for a while. The Red #40 has usually deterred me, but I had these two beets lying around from the winter CSA share... so we gave it a whirl. The wise 'net told me to keep the batter pretty acidic so as to preserve the red hue of the beets. My smart middle child remarked that we knew that from our own experiment this past winter :-) Hence the buttermilk, no baking soda, and added lemon juice. I have read reports that natural cocoa is better than dutch processed but I have no idea what kind I used, it was a bulk purchase a while ago. The web said not to overdo the cocoa, so we kept it to 2 Tbsp but a tad more might not have hurt. Here we go for the specifics:

Ingredients:

1 cup flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder (don't use more)
1 tsp salt
2 Tbsp cocoa
1 1/4 cups sugar (don't cut this below 1 cup at most)

1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 cup butter milk
1 1/3 cup pureed cooked beets
2 eggs
2/3 stick butter, soft
1 tsp vanilla

Method:

Preheat oven to 375 (365 if using convection). Stir the first group of ingredients together. I actually only used 1 cup of sugar (the recipes I had looked at used 1 1/2), but I think 1 1/4 would be optimal.

Blend the second group of ingredients with the stick blender (that was dirty from pureeing the beets anyway). Then stir both together and fill into mini cupcake molds. We tried mini and standard sizes and there was a significant difference, the mini really comes out better!



Bake for, ahem, as long as seems right. I actually forgot to set a timer. They baked longer than I thought a regular cupcake would. In fact, I sort of forgot them in the oven and feared the worst, but they were just right. Maybe 20 or even 25 minutes, and another 20 minutes for standard size on top of that. I suppose it's all that moisture from the beets that makes them so slow.

  

We didn't frost them. I'm sure if you did, it would only add to the awesome. There is some beet flavor, but all my beet-hating kids ate them, so clearly it wasn't too bad! I plan to keep this recipe around!