Chocolate Beet Cake with Orange Glaze

Beet Cake. Sounds strange, doesn't it? Then, maybe it doesn't when you consider the carrot cake or the sweet potato pie. Featuring root vegetables or tubers in confectionary treats isn't exactly new. Beets, much like carrots, supply a special sweetness, texture and color to a cake.

Root vegetables are essential. They comfort and sustain during dreary, water-logged, winter months. They've got a long shelf life, and they're full of vitamins and sugars. And they're in season now - they can be grown and enjoyed locally (Check Harvest Natural Foods for locally grown foods. They might have that something you didn't know you were looking for).

This beet cake is still a cake. It's not a well-balanced meal. But it is a comforting, hardy addition to a winter meal. Try this recipe with other root vegetables: carrot, parsnip, fennel. Add a half-teaspoon of nutmeg or cinnamon to the dry ingredients for extra flavor.


The Cake:

2 medium beets, peeled and quartered

12 tbs butter, softened, plus extra for pan

1 ½ c granulated sugar

2 ½ c all purpose flour

½ c cocoa

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

4 eggs, room temperature

½ c milk or plain yogurt

Place beets with just enough water to cover them in a small sauce pan, and cover. Bring to a boil, and cook for a few minutes till the beets are just beginning to soften. Preheat oven to 350˚F. Grease a 9 x 13 pan with a little butter. Put the beets with ½ cup of the sugar in a blender or food processor and pulse a few times to purée.

Combine flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a bowl. In a separate large bowl, use an electric mixer to beat the butter and remaining sugar until creamy. Add in eggs one at a time; beat until light and smooth. Beat in the beet purée. Mix in about a third of the flour mixture, followed by half of the milk or yogurt. Alternate between the two, stirring gently, until the batter just evens out.

Turn the batter into the prepared pan and bake until set (35 to 40 minutes). Let cool, then top with glaze.

The Glaze:

½ c freshly squeezed orange juice

1 tbs grated orange zest

½ tsp vanilla extract (optional)

2-3 c confectioner’s sugar

Combine all the ingredients and beat till combined and smooth. Adjust the consistency with liquid or sugar - it should be just pourable.

- adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, 2007

We Have A Playground!

The playground for the Wellness Center is here! It's in a million pieces spread out between 89 boxes, crates, pallets, and giant carboard tubes. It's inside the former PCC building instead of outside where it can be played on, but it's here!

Bob the truck driver pulled into the parking lot about 24 hours later than planned after having to be rerouted through Coos Bay to avoid both 299 and 199 after driving our 8,300 pounds of playground across the country from Pennsylvania. It turns out that a large playground takes up a large truck -- it was the only thing in the truck:

The truck wasn't exactly packed to the rafters, but all those poles and bars and railings take up a lot of space and don't exactly play well with others in terms of being stacked neatly in a pile. We had been scrambling the day before to change our plans for unloading the truck. Many volunteers, a forklift, and a pallet jack were needed, and the plans for getting them to the truck all had to be changed. Luckily, once again, the community came through with everything we needed to move forward on this project.

Employees from Redwood State and National Parks came out in force, along with VISTA and AmeriCorps members, students and staff from Sunset High School and the Bar-O Boys Ranch, and other community members unloaded everything that could be unloaded by hand. A staff member from the Del Norte Community Health Clinic supervised the receiving paperwork and made sure we had every piece and box we need to put it together.

Thursday's forklift was going to come from Crescent Ace Hardware, who have been fantastic partners in this project from the start, but they needed it on Friday. Beyond Waste Salvage, on very little notice, came through with a replacement and unloaded the pallets. (Note the message on the box: The World Needs Play. How true.)

Some cast members from this spring's Lighthouse Rep production hammed it up as they did some heavy lifting. It was heavy, but not THAT heavy.

Eventually, the truck was empty and three rooms of the former PCC building were full:

Then it was time for snacks and group pictures. Our heroic students didn't want to be memorialized for their work, but we captured our parks folks for posterity:

Many thanks to everyone who helped unload our playground. We're now in the process of planning the installation. Within the next two or three months, the empty space in the community garden at the Wellness Center will become this:

The colors in this photo are not the same colors of our playground, but the equipment is all the right stuff in the right place. We have a lot of purple and green in our scheme. Stay tuned for updates about when the installation and grand opening will take place.