Yes, you read right. There’s zucchini in this cake. But don’t react like all “I’m not going to like this” before you tried it! You’re just like Peter – a colleague of mine – who disregarded this cake first, then got persuaded to try a piece and ended up eating three slices. You might be Peter! Please, don’t be Peter. Just trust me.
The trick is this: with the zucchini in the dough (which you don’t see or taste – unlike the carrots in carrot cakes), you need less fat (or oil) to make it moist and delicious. Go, give it a try. If you don’t like it, you can blame me and send me the whole cake – I will make sure, you didn’t waste precious food.
Ingredients
- 250 g zucchini
- 200 g dark chocolate
- 125 ml sunflower seed oil
- 3 eggs
- 200 g sugar
- 150 g plain flour
- 50 g unsweetened cacao powder
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 pinch of salt
- 1 Tbsp vanilla sugar
- 80 g hazelnuts
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 180 ° C.
- Oil a box shaped cake tin and sprinkle it with a Tbsp of flour.
- Grate the zucchini and chop the dark chocolate into pieces.
- Put the hazelnuts in a pan and roast them until golden. Put them in a freezer bag and beat them with a spoon to smash them into pieces.
- Beat the eggs with the sugar, salt and vanilla sugar until it's light yellow and fluffy.
- Mix in the oil slowly and still beating the eggs.
- Mix flour, cacao powder and baking powder.
- Slowly fold the dry ingredients under the egg mixture.
- Put the zucchini, chocolate and hazelnut on top and mix thoroughly.
- Pour the cake batter into the cake tin and bake for 60 mins.
- Enjoy!
This cake tastes even better the next day. The perfect cake to bring into the office and make sure you get that employer-of-the-month-badge. Or in my case: freelancer of the month. Well, if only they had that badge.
When I was a child, I didn’t like zucchini. Just like my other 4 sisters. However, it’s one of the vegetables that grew like crazy in my parents garden. So what did they do? They hid it in chocolate cake. Not this rich version with double chocolate and hazelnut but in a simpler cake but still with chocolate. We loved it!
Since then a few years have passed and I love this versatile vegetable now. (As I proved in my pickled zucchini recipe.) Do you have some food that you hated as a kid and love now? What was your turning point?
Now. Carry on!
