Natural Red Velvet Cake

So I decided that I wanted a red velvet cake for Callum's first birthday.  Besides it fitting perfectly with a sock monkey theme, red cake will show up great on his face for pictures!  Well, there's no way I was feeding my baby a bottle of red dye #40 (A BOTTLE!), so I started researching natural options.  The consensus?  Beets.  So I looked at a bunch of recipes for red velvet cakes made with beets and ended up squashing them all together and making my own.
Here's the result.

3 organic beets, boiled for 40 minutes, and then cooled, peeled, and chopped coarsely
1/4 cup organic applesauce
1/4 cup organic butter, softened
3/4 cups organic sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp. organic vanilla extract
1 1/2 Tb. lemon juice
1/2 cup organic plain yogurt
1 ½- 2 Tb. organic cocoa powder or organic raw chocolate powder
1 tsp. baking powder
1 cups all purpose flour or cake flour, sifted
1/2 tsp. sea salt

Trim greens and roots off beets, slice in half, put in saucepan and cover with water.  Boil for 40 minutes until you can poke with a fork.  Let cool and peel skin off beets.

Puree beets and applesauce until smooth.

In a large mixing bowl in an electric mixer, cream together butter and sugar. Add egg and beat. Add vanilla, and then add the beet mixture, mixing well. Add the lemon juice and yogurt and mix well again.

In a separate bowl, mix the cocoa, baking powder, flour, and salt together. Add to the wet ingredients and mix until well blended.

Pour batter into prepared pan and bake for approximately 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes before removing from pans and allowing to cool completely. 

I made Callum's in a small Pampered Chef batter bowl and baked for 45 minutes at 350.  I should have added all the batter to the bowl, but oh well.  The taste result- not horrible.  :)  It has a really zingy after-taste from the beets which could probably be helped with a little extra sweetener, but since it's for a baby 1 year old, I don't think he'll mind too much.  I hope.
For the sake of party guests, I also made a boxed devil's food cake in cake balls and mini cupcakes.
Will update this weekend on the partay!