Beets! Beets! Beets!

We’ve been a little serious around here what with two days of posts (here and here) on body image stuff, so I think it’s time for something more fun.

Like cake.

I don’t make desserts for every day meals. And I generally don’t bake cakes in the summertime. But you know? Some days, you just feel like having some cake.

On this day, I was harvesting beets to make room for the very enthusiastically reproducing strawberry plants. My son and husband were helping me:

So, earlier in the summer, I’d pulled a few beets and grated them, raw, into lettuce salads, where they mingled beautifully with the vinaigrette and brought some lively color and flavor to our (seemingly) endless bowls of leafy greens. You can make a beet salad that’s mostly just, well, beets, but I just wasn’t feelin’ it.

I spent several hours with the beets, boiling them, slipping their skins off cutting them up to put in the freezer, and when I was done, my fingers were stained brownish and I was tired of looking at beets qua beets, so I did something really fun:

I pureed them in the food processor with some applesauce, added sugar, sour cream, some eggs, some vanilla, some flour, some cocoa powder, and some baking soda and made the most beautiful red-tinted cake batter–

And that, of course, turned into this: And we’re back to where we started.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, beets are good for you, blah, blah, blah, antioxidants and phytochemicals and fiber AND–THEY TASTE AMAZING IN CHOCOLATE CAKE, which is the best part:

“Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful.” (Robert Farrar Capon)

{Hoping YOUR day has some unnecessary goodness in it, too!}