Always looking for more meals to hide zucchini in, in this edition of Jaci can cook, Jaci has hidden zucchini inside a cake
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
Jaci Hicken, a seasoned Riv journalist and trained chef, shares her wealth of knowledge on growing, cooking and preserving homegrown produce and insights from running her cooking school. In this edition, Jaci hides vegetables inside a cake.
I shared a fascinating process of turning zucchini into pineapple a couple of columns ago, creating a year’s supply of mock pineapple.
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It's a unique preserving technique that you might find intriguing.
At that time, there were 47 vacola jars. Now there are 56, which should be a year’s supply.
Jaci’s jars of zucchini pineapple have grown to 56.
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
There was, and always will be, more zucchinis than anyone can eat in my vegetable patch.
Over time, I’ve experimented with zucchini in a variety of dishes, from pasta sauce to omelettes, kebabs, quiche, roast vegies, zucchini fritters and even grilled zucchini on the side of everything.
In the pantry, there is three-colour zucchini relish, dilled zucchini, curried zucchini relish, zucchini bread and butter pickles and grated and frozen zucchini to be hidden in meals at a later time.
Pretty much zucchini any way you like or can think of.
The joy of experimenting with zucchini in cooking is that it’s a blank canvas, ready to be transformed into any dish you can imagine.
The only way I haven’t cooked zucchini this season has been in a cake.
Luckily, reader Sherril sent in my first reader recipe, which gave me an idea of what else could be done with zucchini: a zucchini cake.
Sherril has been cooking this cake for years as a way to use up her homegrown zucchini.
Like all home chefs, I’m forever changing a recipe, even just a little bit.
I like using weights, not cups for ingredients, so the brown sugar has become grams.
Next time I bake this cake, the rest of the ingredients will likely become grams.
Sherril’s cake had carrot in it, but no carrots were used in mine as there is more than one type of zucchini, and there was a tromboncino zucchini in the fridge to use.
A tromboncino zucchini starts out green, ripening to orange, a bit like a butternut pumpkin, so you wouldn’t know it wasn’t carrot in a cake.
The zucchini sitting on my bench was a homegrown, slightly bigger but not yet a marrow zucchini that ended up with what looked like a bit more than a cup of grated fruit.
This is how much zucchini and tromboncino zucchini Jaci baked into the cake. The cup measure is pictured to give you an idea of volume.
Photo by
Jaci Hicken
That was the same for the tromboncino after cutting off a 5cm piece and grating it.
Sherril suggested that you mix up the flours if you like, using wholemeal, white and wholemeal half-and-half or just white self-raising flour.
For this recipe, I used only wholemeal.
Zucchini cake
Ingredients
125g butter
175g brown sugar
2 eggs
About 1 cup of coarsely grated zucchini
½ cup of grated tromboncino zucchini (this is where you could use carrot if you don’t have tromboncino zucchini or just use more zucchini)
⅓ cup of plain yoghurt
2 cups of wholemeal self-raising flour (or try mixing your flours like Sherril suggested).
Method
Heat the oven to 180ºC. Grease and line a 20cm round cake tin.
In your mixer bowl, cream the butter and sugar together. Once well creamed, add the eggs one at a time.
Coarsely grate the zucchini and tromboncino zucchini (or carrot). Add to the butter and sugar, along with the yoghurt. Mix.
Add the flour and mix to combine. Pour into the cake tin.
Place in the oven and bake until cooked.
At the baking step, things can go awry, as my oven seems slow. My cake took 60 minutes at 180ºC to cook.
Now, feed it to your family and forget to mention that you have hidden vegetables in the cake.
Jaci would love to hear if you have a culinary secret of hiding vegetables to share. Let her know at jaci.hicken@mmg.com.au
