Vegan Chopped!

I just competed in the Post Punk Kitchen Vegan Chopped! on-line dessert challenge. The basket ingredients were red bunch beets, fresh mangoes, unsweetened dried coconut, and crispy rice cereal.  This is the second Vegan Chopped! challenge I've participated in, and they've been a blast!  My entry?  Spiced Beet Cake with Crispy-Coconut Frosting and Mango-Ginger-Lime ice cream.  It was pretty tasty, although I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to make beet cake again.

Spiced Beet Cake
The final cake was really surprising!  The batter was bright purple-y-red, but the baked cake was a lovely spice-cake brown.  The cake was nice and moist, and you just got a hint of the earthy flavor of the beets.

Ingredients:
1 bunch red beets, oven roasted and pureed (I got a little over a cup of pureed beets out of my bunch)
Add enough applesauce to pureed beets to get to 1 and 1/2 cups of puree total
1/2 cup veggie oil
1/2 cup orange juice
2 tsp. vanilla
1 T. grated fresh ginger
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. allspice
1/4 tsp. mace
1/8 tsp. cloves

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease & flour your cake pans (I used two med-small ramekins and then baked the rest in a muffin tin).  Mix the dry ingredients in large bowl and set aside.  Whisk the wet ingredients together in another bowl and then add to the dry.  Mix until well combined.  Scoop/pour into prepared pans and bake.  The cupcakes took about 18 minutes; the ramekins took about 22 minutes.  Let cool for a few minutes in the pans, then remove to a rack to complete the cooling process.

Crispy-Coconut Frosting
1 cup canned coconut milk (shaken, not stirred)
1 cup sugar
2 T. Ener-G egg replacer mixed with 3 T. warm water
1 tsp. ground ginger

Combine above in small saucepan and cook over medium heat until boils, whisking regularly.  Boil for one minute and then remove from heat.  Then stir/whisk in:

3 T. Earth Balance
1/2 tsp. salt

Then stir in:

1 cup Crispy Rice Cereal
1 1/3 cups toasted unsweetened coconut

Set aside to cool.  Frost cakes!

Mango-Ginger-Lime Ice Cream
2 ripe mangoes
grated zest and juice of 1 lime
1 T. grated fresh ginger
1/2 cup sugar
1 T. molasses
pinch of salt
1 can coconut milk
1/4 tsp. xanthan gum

Peel and chop mangoes and put in blender.  Add remaining ingredients and puree until smooth.  Refrigerate for at least several hours until well-chilled.  Put in ice cream machine and let it churn!  When ice cream maker is finished, I like to put the ice cream in the freezer for a few hours to set up.