Not-Quite-Vegan Recipe of the Month: Purple Velvet Cake

Let me get this out of the way first: No, this isn't a vegan recipe. It's meat-free and dairy-free, and therefore low-carbon, but it does contain eggs. But it's just such an interesting dish, I couldn't pass up the chance to share it with you here, and I knew I wouldn't get a chance to do a separate Recipe of the Month for April.

To understand how we came to make this recipe, you need a little background. With social distancing regulations in effect, my family wasn't able to get together this year for a Passover Seder (the traditional meal that kicks off this Jewish holiday). So we decided instead to hold a Seder via Zoom, with each individual household gathered around its own Seder table but broadcasting sound and video to all the others. And that meant that, for the first time, we had to assemble our own Seder plate.

The Seder plate, for all you non-Jews, is the centerpiece of the Seder table. It has several symbolic objects on it, representing different elements in the story of Passover. There's a roasted egg and a green vegetable, symbolizing rebirth, which get dipped in salt water, symbolizing the tears of the Jews during their enslavement. There's a bitter herb, representing the bitterness of slavery (our family always used horseradish for this, although I think technically that's supposed to go in a separate spot on the plate), which you eat along with charoses, a sweet mixture of grated apples, nuts, and wine that represents the mortar the enslaved Jews used to build the Pyramids. And there's a roasted lamb shank, signifying the lamb that each Hebrew household slaughtered, smearing its blood on the door to tell the Angel of Death to "pass over" those houses when slaying the first-born children of all the families in Egypt. (The God of the Old Testament is really not a nice guy.)

Well, Brian and I were not about to buy a lamb shank we wouldn't eat just for this holiday, so I searched online for a vegetarian alternative. Several sites suggested substituting a beet, since its red color can represent blood. So we did that, and then we had to figure out a way to use up the beet during Passover. I personally don't care for this vegetable, but Brian is fond of pickled beets, and so I figured he'd just use it for that purpose. But he decided to get fancy. He started hunting around for a dessert recipe that contained beet — preferably, one that did not use flour, since that would make it off-limits for me until Passover week was over. And eventually he hit on this cake recipe, labeled Purple Velvet Torte, which met both requirements.

This dish is a flourless chocolate cake, which is more like a souffle than a traditional cake. It's got a very light, spongy texture on account of all the egg in the batter, which you need to get it to rise. Brian had made flourless chocolate cakes before, so he knew it was feasible. He modified the recipe somewhat based on what we had in our pantry, substituting canola oil for grapeseed oil, additional vanilla extract for the almond extract, and simple syrup (two parts water to one part sugar) for agave nectar.

Unfortunately, this photo doesn't give you a good idea of how purple this cake really was in person. In the picture, it just looks like a basic chocolate cake — and to be honest, it tasted a lot like one too. To me, it didn't taste like beets at all, although there was a sort of fruity element to the flavor that hinted there was something going on in there besides plain chocolate. If I hadn't known what it was, I'd probably have guessed cherry. It made for a more complex and interesting flavor than our standard vegan chocolate cake, and the flourless construction gave it a lighter and drier texture. But thanks to the moisture contributed by the grated beet, it wasn't too dry, which is the most common problem with flourless cakes. It was just a nice, simple, light chocolate cake that you'd never guess the secret ingredient of.

So, would we make this recipe again? Well, we probably wouldn't go out of our way to. Although we're not aiming for full-superpower vegan, we prefer to avoid animal products when we can, so for most occasions we'd prefer our basic vegan chocolate cake (with or without vegan coconut icing). But if we ever specifically need to make a flourless cake, say for a gluten-free friend, I think this recipe would be a great choice for that purpose. And it'll also come in handy if we ever find ourselves again with leftover beet to dispose of.