Delicious Beet Cupcakes, Cakes and Pancakes

(43 Months)

We LOVE roasted beets!  Ok, let me clarify.  We love baking with roasted beets.  If you haven't tried baking with roasted beets, you are missing out on some delicious and guilt-free desserts, muffins and pancakes.

Beets are a top ten superfood that are high in potassium, folic acid and fiber.  When they are baked into a sweet treat, they are undetectable!  Seriously, it's true.  I didn't believe it either, until I tried my first beet recipe.  Now, we bake with beets at least once a week!  Click here to learn how to roast beets.

Little Miss and Wild One love helping me bake sweet treats.  They help with every part of the recipe.  Cracking eggs, pouring milk, measuring out wet and dry ingredients, mixing.  They even have created their own recipes, by adding in an unexpected goody into the batter- peanut butter, chocolate chips, bananas, blueberries.  I love having them in the kitchen with me, even though each recipe takes twice as long to make and the mess is always bigger than I expected, I love having them on their stools with me.  They talk about it for days, narrating each part that they participated in.  They recreate the memory in their play kitchen.  I know that they won't remember this when they are older, but I will always cherish these moments.

All of the following recipes, they have helped make and passed their taste-test (we only use a pass/fail method of determining if a recipe is a keeper or not, no maybes here).  These are all kid-friendly baking recipes.

Here are our favorite roasted beet recipes.  They all have either whole wheat pastry flour or a blend of whole wheat and unbleached all purpose flour.  Some use non-fat Greek yogurt or applesauce in place of butter and oil.  All are delicious and practically guilt-free.

Fudgy Beet Cupcakes - we substituted dark chocolate
almond milk for the vanilla almond milk, and threw in
1/3 cup of melted bittersweet chocolate chips with the
wet ingredients.  The result was a beautifully rich,
glossy cupcake.  Light and yet fudgy.








Double Dark Chocolate Chip Muffins
from Pinch My Salt - these have noticeably
more chocolate, but ooooohhh they are so
delicious.  We even made this into a bundt
cake and it was devoured within a few days.





Red Beet Pancakes - in our home we call
these Pinkalicious Pancakes.  These pancakes
are definitely on their Top Five Pancakes list.
Sweet and gorgeous in color.  One batch will
make enough to feed your family, plus have
enough to freeze.

Red Velvet Cupcakes - we altered this recipe,
replacing the all-purpose flour with whole wheat
pastry flour.  We also only used 1 3/4 cups of flour,
and substituted 1/4 cup of unsweetened dark cocoa
powder.  Instead of canola oil, we have found that
unsweetened applesauce and non-fat Greek yogurt
both produce a light and fluffy cupcake.

Dark Chocolate Cake - this is sweetened with real maple
syrup and raw honey.  We never have light olive oil in the
pantry, so we substituted unsweetened applesauce.  This
was fantastic!








If you have never baked with roasted beets, try one of the above recipes and you'll be converted into a beet lover.  And when the kids ask for another cupcake or slice of cake, you can feel good about saying "yes".