An Extremely Moist Chocolate-Beet Cake with Crème Fraîche and Poppy Seeds

I have lost count of the number of appreciative emails and blog mentions about the brownies and the chocolate almond cake in The Kitchen Diaries. They are received gratefully. It is true that I am rarely happier than when making chocolate cake. I especially like baking those that manage to be cakelike on the outside and almost molten within. Keeping a cake’s heart on the verge of oozing is down partly to timing and partly to the ingredients—ground almonds and very good-quality chocolate will help enormously. But there are other ways to moisten a cake, such as introducing grated carrots or, in this case, crushed beets. The beets are subtle here, some might say elusive, but using them is a lot cheaper than ground almonds, and they blend perfectly with dark chocolate. This is a seductive cake, deeply moist and tempting. The serving suggestion of crème fraîche is not just a nod to the sour cream so close to beets’ Eastern European heart, it is an important part of the cake.