Baking Mad Monday - Beetroot & Chocolate Cupcakes

Our friends at Baking Mad have set us a low calorie baking challenge, over the next 5 Mondays we are all going to attempt one of their recipes and would like you lot to vote for your favourite at the end. All of the recipes use Half Spoon granulated sugar by Silver Spoon which is sugar with a touch of sweetener. It reduces the calories as you only need to use half the amount of standard sugar but because the texture doesn't change you still get the same results, excellent!

First up is Sarah, being a cupcake addict she has chosen to bake the beetroot and chocolate cupcakes

Baking Mad provided us with some of the products for this challenge:

And we then purchase the rest ourselves:

Ingredients
3 x Eggs
150g Half Spoon Granulated Sugar
250g Beetroot, peeled & grated
0.5tsp Vanilla Extract
180g Plain White Flour
180g Ground Almonds

2tsp Baking Powder

2 tbsp Cocoa Powder

0.25tsp Salt

284ml Buttermilk

For the topping:

100g Plain Chocolate

2tsp Quark

• Preheat the oven to 180C/160C, gas 4. Line two 12-hole muffin tray with paper cases.
• In a large mixing bowl, whisk up the eggs and sugar for 4 minutes until they are light and fluffy.
• Beat in the grated beetroot and vanilla essence. Add the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, cocoa powder, salt and beat until combined.
• Add the buttermilk. Beat again to ensure everything is well combined.
• Divide the mixture into the paper cases and bake for 20 minutes or until the cakes spring back when pressed gently with a finger. Remove from the cake tin immediately and leave to cool on a wire rack.

The cakes come out a lovely reddish pink colour

• For the icing: Place the chocolate in a small bowl suspended over a pan of simmering water. Melt the chocolate gently. Remove form the heat and stir. Leave to cool. Add the quark and mix. Add enough milk to loosen the consistency to a spreadable icing. Spread the icing over the cup cakes and serve.

Makes 24 cupcakes, they work out at 7 syns each or 7 pro points.

The cakes were lovely and moist which surprised me with the lack of fat in the recipe and the chocolate topping added a lovely chocolate hit, mmmmm!

Yum!

Word of warning, your kitchen will look like you've massacred a few people whilst grating the beetroot but it's worth the mess. The lovely Sarah gave me a great tip for removing the staining from your hands, just put sugar and fairy liquid on your hands afterwards and wash. The colour sticks to the sugar and your hands are stain free, result!