Beetroot cake

If you've ever had your house painted by a professional you'll know the consternation of The Undercoat. You pick a subtle, highly grown up, soft rose colour, and come home from work one day to find your walls coated in a neon shade of lollipop magenta. The painter reassures you. This is the undercoat, he says. You find it almost impossible to believe, you spend two full days convinced you are being completely conned by a guy who had 4 vats of leftover neon paint that he has just covered your interior house with, and then one day you come home to find your house magically transformed, radiating the warm and subtle rose tint you first saw in the Dulux catalogue (or Fired Earth, if you live in Tufnell Park). So it is with beetroot cake, only perhaps even more extraordinary, as the making of a beetroot cake, involving the grating of a vegetable that manages to bleed everywhere, literally EVERYWHERE - on your clothes, in your hair, over the work surface and every utensil, every bowl, the floor, even back into the garden (how? how?), then turns your cake mix into a brilliant shade of purple/pink that would have the R&D guys at Chanel slobbering with envy. I have never before baked a cake involving a vegetable. I've always eschewed carrot cake. I figure, if I want to eat a carrot, I will peel and eat it raw. I can't see the logic of putting it into a cake. Savoury is savoury. Sweet is chocolate. Never the twain shall meet etc and given how avid a reader I am of all the celeb food writers it's not like I have this view out of ignorance. But. Eventually needs must and in this case it was spurred by a close relative of mine, diagnosed with several food intolerances, challenging my culinary skills. And goodness knows I Love A Challenge. So when another close relative emailed me a recipe of a cake that was being sold in his work canteen with several emojis attached expressing the amazingness of the cake experience, I ran right out and stocked up on beetroot. A fabulous recipe this one, sort of based on Nigel Slater's most recent offering - a cake made without flour (hooray for the gluten intolerant) or butter (and the dairy intolerant - bam, kapoow!), deriving its sweetness from a subtle addition of light brown muscovado sugar and relying entirely for its damp, rich texture, on grated beetroot, that, in the making and mixing of the cake, is the lead billing - a rich purple/pink coloured mix that frankly looks as if it was meant for a Polish borscht - and then, gracefully, retires to the back benches in the oven, so that when you pull the cake out again, the egg white whipped and folded in to give it height and air, takes over the lead role, diffusing the colour, and the beetroot provides the cushiony dampness, the foil for the sweetness of the sugar. For extra smug healthiness this cake can have any seed thrown at it - in this case pumpkin, sesame and linseed - and I decorated mine with a lemon glaze, the taste and texture of which were the perfect crunchy contrast, while the one at my relative's canteen went straight for the jugular (and the arteries) with a classic cream cheese frosting. Guys, if you've never made a cake before, this one is for you. My food intolerance-wracked relative will love this, but this is a cake for the masses. Go get your loaf tin Right Now.