It was Mike’s birth­day a cou­ple of weeks ago, and I want­ed to bake him a cake. After see­ing the beet cake video by Tiger in a Jar I thought, why not? I’ll make a beet cake! :D

And after read­ing this post about tie-dye­ing with stuff in the kitchen, there was no way I was going to just pour all that beet water down the drain — I’ll dye stuff with it, while I bake the cake! :D

So we got the largest bunch of beets in the gro­cery store (they were sold by the bunch, not by weight).

 

They had beau­ti­ful­ly ruf­fled leaves with red veins.

 

I cut and boiled the beets in a large pot. Even threw in the stems, because they looked real­ly red.

 

I boiled the beets for a long time — prob­a­bly too long — so I could get as much colour out as pos­si­ble. But that was prob­a­bly why the cake in the end did­n’t taste much like beets :P After tak­ing the beets out I threw in a tied white cot­ton shirt and went on with the baking.

 

It called for bak­ing choco­late but I for­got to buy it. But we had choco­late coins! :D So I used those instead.

 

The cake bat­ter was SO pink!

 

While the cake was bak­ing, I took out the shirt and let it dry on the cloth­ing rack. I was pret­ty hap­py with the shade of pink. I also added a bit of cot­ton yarn to the dye bath half way through.

 

Ta-da! The cake was done! :D

 

Hap­py birth­day, Mike! :D He liked the cake. I think it tast­ed good, kind of like car­rot cake. Just a bit dis­ap­point­ed that it was­n’t pink inside, and the bits of beets had turned into a shade close to that of raisins.

 

The recipe yield­ed quite a large cake. It stood pret­ty tall in a 9″ round pan. I prob­a­bly could have made a small­er round cake and a loaf. We brought half to church the next day, and spent the next two evenings eat­ing beet cake for dessert. It was good though!

The yarn turned out with beau­ti­ful shades of pink after it dried.

 

And with it I cro­cheted a free-form heart.

 

The shirt, though, fad­ed a lot as it dried. So I dyed it again (I saved the beet water in the fridge after the ini­tial dye­ing, just in case I find oth­er things to dye in the next cou­ple of days), added vine­gar to it this time (because I read some­where that it helps to fix the colour in the fab­ric) so the whole shirt smelled like pick­led beets. The colour was more intense the sec­ond time. And I ironed it as it was dry­ing (because I read some­where that it also helps to set the colour). And then I put it in the wash because I could­n’t pos­si­bly wear a shirt that smelled like pick­led beets. And when it came out, all the colours had fad­ed to a yel­lowed old shirt colour :(

 

There’s no way I’m going to rinse the dyed yarn then. And the yarn does­n’t smell as much like pick­led beets.

Well, I was hop­ing to dye fab­ric with­out spe­cial dye agents or fix­a­tives but it looks like the colour would­n’t stay oth­er­wise. Or per­haps I did­n’t do it right… any­way, it was a fun exper­i­ment and I can always use the shirt for some oth­er dye­ing experiments ;)

Have a great start to the week, everyone!