So there’s all this red velvet hype. I can’t quite get around it.  It’s barely chocolate cake with 4 million tablespoons of red food coloring. Am I right? I never had a fascination with ingesting heaps food coloring (although give me Swedish Fish and I’ll sing a different tune). I’m not a stickler about food, but I do like my cooking/baking to be on the more real side of things.

This is a red-velvet on the more real side of things (although you can’t tell much by the pics because I used a dark chocolate cake mix – didn’t have light chocolate or white on-hand). It’s really red. It’s also naturally red.

It also uses only 3 ingredients.*

*When I say 3 ingredients, I really mean 3 components. I’m not oblivious to the fact that white chocolate chips are not a 1-ingredient item. Same with a box cake mix. Tons of stuff goes into those. Fewer ingredients for the more organic brands. For some reason it bothers me when a recipe claims (like this one – I’m such a hypocrite) to only require 3 ingredients when it’s really a store-bought item that contains many ingredients. So I’m a liar. It’s not 3 ingredients. It’s 3 components. 3 store-bought components. That make something surprisingly delicious.

Red Velvet Cookies

Makes about 3 dozen

• 1 can whole beets (NOT PICKLED)
• 8 oz. white chocolate chips
• 1 box cake mix*
• optional: 1 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste

Preheat the oven to 375ºF.

Separate the beets and the juice. In a blender or food processor (I recommend processor because you need a thicker beet paste), puree your beets. Use only enough juice to puree the beets. You’ll have about 9-9.5 ounces of beet puree.

Mix the puree, cake mix and chips together until completely incorporated. I used a rubber spatula. No need to dirty the stand mixer for this one.

Spoon out the cookie dough to a greased pan and bake for 8-10 minutes.

*Use a light chocolate or white box cake mix for a more red cookie. I used double-chocolate box cake mix because that’s what I had on-hand. If I get the chance to re-shoot, I’ll show the difference.

Watch them disappear!