Is it a loaf? Is it a cake? Is it a tree?
Well, It’s not a tree, but it is the other things.
I ended up with a some of Mortimer Chocolate Company‘s chocolate powder mixes and promised we’d come up with something.
Cue many months of fucking about, eventually rummaging through a Morrison’s magazine and the discovery of a recipe that uses courgette in cake. Great idea!
With some slight modifications, here are the delicious results.
It’s only moderately chocolatey, the courgette adds an unfamiliar moistness, but no taste – it’s quite unlike any cake I’d ever tried before and you can even see the little courgette slivers in there.
FAO chocolate lovers: you may want to up your chocolate dosage from 100g to 120g or so. Or try a darker one, this was 70% but I think you could get away with 85% here.
(PS: sorry for the crappy picture!)
- 175g unsalted butter
- 200g golden caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 200g plain flour, sifted
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 200g courgette, grated finely
- 100g 'Ecuador' pure dark chocolate powder from The Mortimer Chocolate Company.
- Before you begin, use a cheese grater to finely grate a courgette. Use one of the grater surfaces which has more numerous and smaller ridges.
- Keep the courgette gratings in a bowl ready for mixing later.
- Heat your oven to 180 C /160 F/ Gas Mark 4.
- Grease the base and sides of a 900g / 2lb loaf tin and line with baking parchment.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.
- Add the eggs and 2tbs of the flour and beat well.
- Stir in the chocolate powder.
- Sift in the remaining flour with the baking powder and fold together thoroughly.
- Now stir in the courgette, making sure it is well distributed throughout the mix.
- Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin, level the top with the back of a spoon and place in oven to bake for an hour until well risen.
- Check that it is cooked by inserting a metal skewer into the centre of the cake; if the skewer comes out clean it is ready, if it doesn’t, bake ten minutes longer and check again.
- Cool in the tin for about 15 minutes then remove the paper and cool completely on a wire rack
- Serve sliced and eat with extreme prejudice.
- We baked this using the ‘all in one’ method, where all the ingredients apart from the courgette are placed in a large mixing bowl and an electric beater is used to combine the ingredients quite quickly. The courgette is then beaten in at the end. It involves less cleaning :v
- The original recipe also called for ground almonds, but we skipped these in favour of a slightly lighter calorie option. As a chocolate cake I think it would have done better with hazlenuts anyway