It’s courgette season, and that can only mean one thing ………. Chocolate and courgette cake!
August in the allotmenting world means courgettes!!! We planted 5 plants back in March and had 3 survivors – they are all happily producing an abundance of fruit – more than I know what to do with. At the moment we are harvesting between 4-6 courgettes a week!
I do generally cook with courgettes, but when the neighbours start avoiding you because they’v had enough it’s time to find some more recipes.
Now I am not a baker – in fact this cake was only the second cake I had made from scratch in my entire life, but wow it tasted amazing and even my no fruit and veg eating child dived in (although I’m pretty sure the sugar content cancels out any goodness from the courgette itself.
We followed the simple recipe below and got stuck in.
Ingredients: (serves 10)
- 350g self-raising flour
- 50g cocoa powder
- 1 tsp mixed spice
- 175ml extra-virgin olive oil
- 375g golden caster sugar
- 3 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- Chocolate chips
- 500ml grated courgette
For the icing:
- 200g cooking chocolate (although we used an entire 300g bar because you can never really have enough chocolate)
- 100ml double cream
Method:
1) Heat the oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Mix the flour, cocoa powder, mixed spice, 1 tsp salt and chocolate chips.
2) Grate the courgette
3) In a separate bowl, add the olive oil, sugar, eggs, vanilla essence and courgette.
4) Mix the dry and wet mixture until you get a dark chocolaty gooey cake mix.
5) Line a 24cm cake tin with greaseproof paper, and pour in your mixture. Bake for 50-60 mins, (courgettes add water to the cake so the time will depend on your courgettes) cook until a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean, and the cake doesn’t wobble. Cool in the tin for 10 mins, then turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool.
Icing Method:
I didn’t realise icing could be made this way and it was soooo good I could have sat and eaten the entire bowl and forgotten the cake completely.
Simply place broken up chocolate into a bowl, bring the double cream to the boil in a saucepan and pour the cream into the chocolate. Mix until all the chocolate has melted. Leave to cool and the chocolate will start to thicken. Pour onto the centre of your cake and let the chocolate drip down! We then added some chocolate curls for decoration.
Serve with ice cream or cream and a cup of tea and enjoy.
