Baking is a beary special way to share the love with the ones you care about, and when that baking is heaped with healthy ingredients like beans, cocoa, and beets, then it's unbeatable!
These UnBeetable Red Velvet Cupcakes taste terrific, and they are gluten, nut, and dairy free, which makes them super for sending to school.
The cubs here couldn't tell that they were any different than the kind that come from a box. Bake up a batch of these beauties, and share them with the special someones in your sphere. Be sure to come to our facebook page to tell us about it if you do too, or if you share the love in any other ways on these days leading up to Valentine's Day. Bon Appetit!
UnBeetable Red Velvet Cupcakes
Ingredients
1 cup (250 mL) pureed roasted beets (see note 1)
1 398 mL can white beans, preferably no salt added, drained and well rinsed (see note 2)
1/4 cup (50 mL) soy milk, or other milk of your choice
2 tsp (10 mL) vanilla extract
1 tbsp (15 mL) canola or safflower oil
2 eggs
2 egg whites
1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp (65 mL) agave nectar (see note 3)
1/4 cup (50 mL) cocoa
1/4 cup (50 mL) sorghum flour (see note 4)
2 tsp (10 mL) baking powder
1 tsp (5 mL) baking soda
1/8 tsp (0.5 mL) salt
Method:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and line muffin tin with paper cups.
2. In a food processor or blender, puree beans and soy milk until well blended.
3. Add vanilla extract through agave nectar to food processor, and process until well incorporated. Add pureed roasted beets, and process until batter is smooth, and no pieces of bean or beet are visable.
4. In a small bowl, stir together cocoa, sorghum flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
5. Add flour mixture to food processor, and process again until batter is smooth.
6. Divide batter evenly between prepared muffin tins, filling each cup approximately 2/3 full.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.
8. Allow to cool on a baking rack, and then enjoy plain, or top with a dusting of confectioner's sugar, or the icing of your choice.
9. Enjoy!
Yield: Approximately 16-18 cupcakes
Note 1: To roast our beets, we preheated the oven to 400 degrees. We then washed and trimmed the leafy ends off of 3 medium sized beets, and wrapped them in aluminum foil. We then roasted them in the oven for about 1 hour, until they were fork tender. When they were cool enough to handle, we used our fingers to slip the skins off (this is really easy, and the beet colour washes off your fingers easily, as long as you don't come into contact with any lemon juice or other acids before you wash your hands). Once the beets had cooled to room temperature, we cut them into large chunks, and pureed them in the food processor. It's okay if there are still beet pieces at this point, because the beets will be further processed when you make the cupcakes. Our three beets yielded almost exactly 1 cup of puree.
Note 2: We have made these with white kidney beans, and navy beans. The cupcakes made with white kidney beans seemed to have a slightly better texture, but both were very good.
Note 3: If you don't have agave nectar, you could likely substitute honey, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, or other liquid sweetener of your choice. We haven't tried it though.
Note 4: You could likely substitute a different sort of gluten free flour, or if gluten is not a concern, you could try using regular all purpose flour in place of the sorghum flour. We just haven't tried it ourselves, since some of the animal associates have to avoid gluten.
In case you are curious, I took beary special care to test these for you. Here is a view of the inside of one:
Beary Truly Yours,
Theodore Bear and the Ape 2 Zebra Kitchen
I've also been told it's not beary good for my teeth, and so sometimes it's nice to have a sugar free way to celebrate.