Beet, Pomegranate & Walnut Valentine Cake

Beet cake, white chocolate-cream cheese frosting, walnut praline...and a bonus recipe if you scroll down far enough!

My “Mycelial Meditation” was published in the most recent issue of Sine Theta Magazine. There’s an online release party/reading tomorrow at 7-9pm EST (my reading will be last, if you want to log on around 8 to be lulled into a sober shroomy trance).

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IMO, Valentine’s Day should never be romantic (good romance is never scheduled, anyway), but should always be celebrated like a kid: pink hearts and chocolate and paper lace and afternoon crafts. This cake is kind of like that. It’s an extravagant double layer affair, with fluffy white chocolate-cream cheese frosting, pomegranate seeds, and walnut praline sandwiched between pleasantly beet-y cake layers. There’s sweetness and celebration, but nothing tooth-aching or childish about it. It’s big enough that it would be good to share, whether at the end of a dinner party or delivered in fat triangles to friends nearby.

I adapted the cake recipe from a beet red velvet cake where the cocoa powder wasn’t doing much for the flavor but was muddying the beautiful natural pink of the crumb. Even if it doesn’t mix together completely uniformly (don’t overmix the batter!), I love the tie-dyed look. I think it makes a great snacking cake on its own, but the frosting is what makes it a party. Generally I don’t like frosting (it just tastes like sugar to me), but this frosting combines the tartness of cream cheese and pomegranate molasses with the lightness of whipped cream. The sweetness comes from white chocolate which is more interesting to me than plain sugar.

Cake is kind of difficult to bake well, in comparison to cookies or brownies, so I did a lot of research into mixing techniques, butter:oil ratios, and the other factors that go into creating a texture that is light and fluffy but also moist and tender. I want to summarize the most important points so that you pull it off superbly:

• About an hour before you do ANYTHING, pull out all the butter, eggs, milk, cream, and cream cheese and let it come to room temperature (technically, a cool room temperature, like 65°F). For the cake, this will lead to the best aeration during creaming for the fluffiest texture. For the frosting, the warmer temperature of the ingredients means the white chocolate won’t seize up when mixed in and make the frosting grainy.

• Get everything ready for baking before you mix the cake batter: oven preheated, cake pans lined. As soon as the baking soda mixes with the acid of the pomegranate vinegar, the leavening process begins, and you want that to happen in the oven. Mix briefly and get it into the oven quickly!

• Make sure to cream the sugar and butter for the cake very well before adding in other ingredients. You want it light and fluffy (it’s possible to over-cream the butter till its whipped — that’s also not good, but more often people under-cream).

Okay, that’s it! Go make this cake and enjoy a silly pink holiday!

Are you vegan and sad that this cake is not for you? Check out my Valentine’s recipe from last year: Chocolate Cherry Rye Twists. And if you like these recipes — become a paid subscriber for access to all of them!

Beet & Pomegranate Cake

Ingredients

• 200 grams (1 ¾ cup) AP flour

• 28 grams (¼ cup) cornstarch

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon sea salt

• 170 grams beets (or 1 heaping cup), uncooked, peeled and roughly chopped

• 50 grams (3 tablespoons) pomegranate molasses

• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

• 180 grams (¾ cup) whole milk at room temperature

• 300 grams (1 ½ cup) granulated sugar

• 113 grams (1 stick) butter at room temperature, plus more for greasing pan

• 3 large eggs, at room temperature

• 50 grams (¼ cup) neutral oil (I use sunflower oil)

To assemble:

• 1x white chocolate cream cheese frosting (recipe below)

• 1x walnut praline (recipe below)

• 1 cup fresh pomegranate seeds

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.

2. Cut parchment paper into circles to fit two 9-inch cake pans. Butter the bottoms of the pans, line with a piece of parchment, and then add more butter. (This is an annoying step but won’t you be happier when half your cake doesn’t stick to the the pan when you try to take it out?)

3. In a big bowl, mix together the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

4. In a food processor, combine the beet, pomegranate molasses, and vanilla extract. Process on high until the mixture is close to a paste. Add the milk and process until it is a uniform color and very smooth.

5. In an electric mixer, add the sugar and butter and beat until smooth and fluffy (but not until it looks like clotted cream). Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Add the oil and beat until smooth.

6. Alternate mixing in the beet mixture and the dry ingredients, mixing until just combined after each addition. (You don’t want to overmix here, or the cake will turn out more dense and tough.)

7. Pour the cake batter evenly between the two cake pans. You can tap the pans gently against the table several times to even out the batter and reduce air bubbles.

8. Put the pans in middle of the oven and bake for about 25-30 minutes, until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. The cake will probably be a little more cratered than others you’ve baked.

9. Right after they come out of the oven, run a butter knife around the edges of the cakes to release the sides. Let them cool in the pan about 10 minutes.

10. Once cool enough to handle, cover the pan with a plate and then invert the pan and plate together to release the cake. Remove the parchment. Then invert the cake again onto a cooling rack and let it cool completely.

11. Spread the bottom layer with half of the frosting and sprinkle it with pomegranate seeds and praline walnuts. Sandwich with the top layer and repeat with a layer of frosting, pomegranate seeds and walnuts.

12. Refrigerate for storage, but eat at room temperature if you can.

White chocolate cream cheese frosting

Make sure you let the cream cheese and butter come to room temperature before starting this frosting (cut them up into squares to let them warm a little quicker). If the melted white chocolate hits cold butter, it’ll immediately seize up into little granules that ruin the texture of the frosting. The closer everything is in temperature when it comes together, the better. Using a food processor instead of a stand mixer also helps to create a smooth texture.

I like a very light frosting, which is why I mix in the whipped cream at the end (that also helps to tone down the taste so that it doesn’t completely overwhelm the cake). If you’d prefer a richer more buttercream-like frosting, just leave out the heavy cream.

Ingredients

• 175 grams white chocolate

• 8 oz (1 package) room temperature cream cheese

• 56 grams (½ stick or 4 tablespoons) room temperature butter

• 20 grams (1 tablespoon) pomegranate molasses

• ¼ teaspoon salt

• ½ cup heavy cream

Method

1. Set up a double boiler to melt the white chocolate: add an inch of water to a pot that can snugly fit a heat-safe bowl (shallow enough that it’s bottom isn’t submerged in the water). Let the water come to a boil on the stove and put the white chocolate into the bowl, stirring with a plastic spatula until it’s fully melted. Alternatively, you can melt the white chocolate in the microwave in bursts of 30 seconds, stirring between. Remove the white chocolate from its heat source and let sit for a couple minutes.

2. Add the cream cheese, butter, pomegranate molasses, and salt to a food processor and process on high until well combined. Scrape in all the white chocolate (it should be cool enough to touch but still soft) and process some more until you have a completely uniform texture. Put the frosting into a bowl and let it sit in the fridge while you do the next step.

3. In a stand mixer with the whisk attachment, whip the heavy cream into stiff peaks (until it looks like Reddi-Whip, basically).

4. Take out the bowl from the fridge and gently fold in the whipped cream, by drawing a figure-8 with your plastic spatula. You want it to be fully incorporated but not to lose the air from whipping.

5. The frosting will probably still be a little loose, so let it firm up in the fridge for 20-30 minutes before using it. You can store it in the fridge in a sealed container for a week (take it out 30 minutes to an hour before you want to use it).

Simple walnut praline

This makes a little more walnut praline than you’ll need for the cake (unless you want it really nutty! Which is cool). I just like it so much that I’ve been adding it to ice cream or buttered toast or snacking on it by the handful.

Ingredients

• ¼ cup heavy cream

• 6 tablespoons light or dark brown sugar

• 150 grams (~2 loosely-packed cups) walnuts, finely-chopped

• 2 teaspoons crunchy salt, like Maldon

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.

2. In a bowl, mix together the heavy cream and brown sugar. Add the chopped walnuts and mix well to coat.

3. Spread the mixture on a baking sheet (lining the sheet with parchment or aluminum foil will make cleanup much easier). Sprinkle them all over with the salt.

4. Bake for ~20 minutes, until you can smell the nuts and they look lightly browned.

BONUS MUFFIN RECIPE!!!

YOU SCROLLED DOWN SO FAR THAT YOU GET ANOTHER RECIPE

This is basically the same recipe as the cake, but with more beets, half the sugar, and a slightly lower butter:oil ratio. I also recommend mixing in some well-chopped walnuts and golden raisins. They’re kind of like what I want a morning glory muffin to be, except less dense and more vegetal (in a good way). You can toast and eat them with cream cheese or butter for breakfast, or go ahead and make the above frosting and have them as less-sweet cupcakes.

You can use a pretty variable amount of beets here and they’ll still come out well.

Yield: 12-16 muffins

Ingredients

• 100 grams (~1 cup chopped) walnuts

• 200 grams (1 ¾ cup) AP flour (if you want, swap 50 grams for buckwheat/rye/whatever flour)

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• ½ teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon sea salt

• between 200 - 275 grams beets

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

• 50 grams (3 tablespoons) pomegranate molasses

• 180 grams (¾ cup) whole milk

• 150 grams (¾ cup) sugar

• 85 grams (6 tablespoons) butter

• 66 grams (⅓ cup) neutral oil

• 3 large eggs

• 75 grams (½ cup) golden raisins

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.

2. Toast the walnuts and chop them up as fine as you want (I like them quite fine).

3. Melt some butter and use a pastry brush or paper towel to grease a muffin tin (I made mine small, so I needed 2 muffin tins).

4. Follow steps 3-6 of the cake recipe, but don’t stress so much over creaming the butter and sugar or getting the beet mixture to be super smooth. The batter will end up thicker than the cake.

5. Mix in the walnuts and golden raisins.

6. Use a cookie scooper or two spoons to scoop the batter into the greased muffin tins.

7. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until a cake tester comes out clean. A few minutes after you take the muffins from the oven, gently slide each one out using a butter knife and let them finish cooling on a cooling rack.