Cooking 9/10ths of the time

Hello beetroot lovers, I know that you exist because you have been shyly telling me how much you dig the stuff ever since my beetroot carpaccio recipe popped up here. It's exactly like that situation where you mention one day that you were attacked by a squirrel when young and then suddenly everyone's like, "Oh yeah, I was attacked by a squirrel too". Exactly like that. So, I was asked to make a cake with beetroot in it by my co-star Libby, who has been on a de-tox. I think that detoxing is something that young people do, or dilettantes, or if you hit the sauce a bit much and end up rolling down a series of hills (or possibly sand dunes) at night thinking that you are a dachshund and then lay in a gutter and wake the next morning covered in vomit and some sort of red paint. That's just a guess though. Beetroot and chocolate have a high regard for each other. They like to be mixed and they are fond of being baked into a union that only a hungry mouth can free t...

Yes, lets just say straight up that it's a packet mix, I was curious to see if a packet mix could be any good. Frankly if Donna Hay couldn't pull it off then no-one can. That woman is a goddamn marvel. The Macarons looked good on the cover too, virginal white with some exceedingly naughty looking ganache in between. Oh Stop it! What is the difference between a macaroon and macaron, is it just fancy pretentious spelling? Or is one actually correct and the other some bastardised Anglo version, it's generally the way it goes. The box is sort of gratifyingly heavy too, with an expensive look matched only by it's price. I forget what it cost, but more than White Wings. I have wanted to make macarons before but they look fiddly and like you need a piping bag and I find that the more that eggs are involved the higher the bad mojo for me. So actually this was a blessing in a blue box. There are three packets inside the box, the "egg mix", the almond mix and...