I didn’t know that #cakecamp at the UK’s first Library Camp was going to be a competitive event, so it came as a double surprise to learn that Andy Mabbett adjudged my cake the winner.  Every cake I tried was wonderful, so I’m rather sorry that I got to take away a bottle of fizz (not sorry enough to give it to anyone else though, you’ll note…).

Anyway, as I rarely manage to cook any recipe the same way twice, I though I’d share just exactly what I did this time, for those who are interested.  There’s a pictorial tutorial below, or a one-page printable recipe (text only) for you to download and keep. Happy baking!

What made this version different to previous beetroot cakes I’ve made was that I used gluten-free flour (Doves Farm white self-raising mix) instead of self-raising wheat flour.  The effect was, I think, to make the cake crumblier (sorry to anyone who got in a mess!), moister and denser.

First of all, you need ingredients. I get enormous beetroots from the local farmers’ market, and apparently almost everything else from Waitrose (yes, yes, I know… Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing, cardigan-knitting librarian type to the very core).

Start by cooking your beetroot (unless you’ve bought pre-cooked ones):

Cooking beets is very easy - boil them with their skins on for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Let them cool a bit, and then the skins will come off just by rubbing them.

While they’re bubbling away do the boring things like weighing out flour and switching on the oven and lining a tin:

I used an 8” square tin, which is quite big for this quantity of cake. Result: thin-ish cake with large area. Perfect for allowing lots of people to have a little bit. (Also, handy because it makes a cake the right size to fit into the old biscuit tin I use for cake transportation.)

And now… the fun bit!  Turn this

into something so pink that the camera can hardly cope:

Slop it into the tin, and spend the next 30 minutes sitting in front of the oven chanting ‘rise, cake, rise’.

I didn’t take any pictures of making the icing. I also didn’t measure how much of anything I used. The recipe’s a bit vague here - good luck. You can’t really go wrong with cream cheese, butter and sugar though. I wish I’d put more colouring into this icing - really hot pink would have been fun.  But I was fed up with the mess I was making all over the kitchen by this point…

Now, feed it to the librarians.

Recap: recipe here, pictures here. Thank you to everyone who said nice things about it.