I had other plans for my cake this week but my better half convinced me to make a cake with a special home-grown ingredient, straight out of our tiny garden. It could have been mint. It could have been apple, or lemon, or raspberries. It was none of these. It was a courgette. A mighty courgette. In fact, it was a whopper!
Garden courgette
In fact, it was so big I only needed to use half of it. Here are the other ingredients (and showing off a 2nd courgette, which was not used). A full list can be found here
Chocolate courgette cake ingredients
And here are the ingredients for the chocolate topping
Chocolate topping ingredients
I should say at this point that the recipe I was following uses a 24cm cake tin. I only noticed this important point half way through my bake when I thought I had enough mixture to feed an army. Scroll down to see the mountain of cake I ended up with. If that looks too much to get your chops around, then I recommend halving your ingredients. However, if you want a cake that will last a team of 4 all week then follow me.
500ml of grated courgette
Grate your courgette. The measurement is in millilitres, not grams, so you need a measuring jug, rather than scales. It’s volume we are interested in, not weight. This amount is approximately half a large courgette. Admire your efforts, then leave to one side. We’ll need this later.
Flour and cocoa powder mixed
Also, be aware you need two large bowls for this bake. This is the first and is used for mixing all the dry ingredients; flour, cocoa, spice mix and 1tsp of salt.
The *other* bowl with ingredients
In the other large bowl, mix all the wet ingredients plus the sugar. I was amazed at how much sugar goes into this cake; 375g. When measuring this out you it looks like a mountain of sugar. If I was making this cake again, I would try reducing this amount by to around 300g instead and tasting the results. It might disrupt the ratios and chemistry of the cake – I’m not sure. Have you made this cake? What do you think? Write a comment below and let me now.
Courgette cake mixture
Give it all a good mix, then add in the dry mix from the other bowl. Do this slowly so you don’t get the flour all over your kitchen.
Adding the cocoa powder
When fully mixed, add the chopped toasted hazelnuts.
Tip: Leave a few hazelnuts aside for garnishing your cake at the end.
…and the nuts
Spoon all the mixture into a dish. Either use a large 24cm dish as mentioned in the original recipe, or use two smaller dishes like I did below. Line each with some baking paper. Later you’ll stack these on top of each other.
Spoon into cake dishes
Bake according to the recipe.
Tip: When done each will rise slightly. This will cause a problem when stacking the cakes, so you need to trim the top from one.
Trim the top from one cake, as shown here on the right
Now its time to make the topping. This is the point at which I struggled. The recipe simply uses chocolate and double-cream to make an icing. However I wasn’t sure about the method which suggested boiling the cream and pouring over the broken chocolate. I’m no expert, but I have never heard of boiling double cream to melt the chocolate.
I would have melted the chocolate over a bain marie first, then stirred in the cold cream. However, this wasn’t my recipe, so I went with it and followed the instructions as described.
Hot double cream on broken chocolate
So far so good. But after a minute of stirring, it all went a bit…wrong. Oils were coming to the top, the mixture was greasy and the chocolate looked a bit lumpy, almost burnt. Not knowing how to remedy the situation and with it being late on a Sunday evening, I thought it best to leave overnight and if it looked okay in the morning I would smear over my cake.
After a terrible night sleep involving chocolate monster nightmares I woke to find a bowl of unpleasant looking solid chocolate and what I would describe as ‘fat’. I didn’t want to taste it to confirm. Did I do something wrong? Have you boiled cream before and mixed with chocolate to good effect? Let me know – Leave a comment below.
Chocolate sauce, the next morning – not good
This meant I went into the office on Monday with empty hands and quashed expectations of my fellow crusaders. They would have to wait another day.
Back in my kitchen that evening (after buying yet more chocolate) I found a separate recipe for chocolate cake icing here.
New chocolate topping
Now this was looking a whole lot more hopeful. I ended up with a lot of mixture, so again I would reducing the ingredients by around 25% if you have two cakes and want a soft middle, or reduce by 50% if you have a single cake and just want something for the top.
Tip: In the recipe for the icing it says the longer you beat the mixture the more ‘stiff’ the icing goes. This certainly was true and I kept beating until I felt the mixture was buttery in texture and easily spreadable
Spoon on the topping
With the buttery mixture, spoon and spread out the chocolate on the lower cake first (the one you trimmed earlier). Then repeat on the ‘top’ cake. Then carefully stack
Tower of chocolate and courgette
Stand back and marvel at your cake mountain. Good luck finding a tin big enough to transport that bad boy into work.
I learnt lots during this bake. I learnt to read through a recipe before starting it, making sure the amount of ingredients are right for the size of cake you are baking (the clue is in the size of the tin used to bake it!). I also learnt to trust your instincts and go with what you feel is right. If I had done this with the topping I wouldn’t have wasted two excellent bars of chocolate.
Tip: Leave a little chopped toasted hazelnut to sprinkle on the top of the cake. I put all mine in the mixture so had none leftover and my cake ended up looking a little bare on top.
Cake mountain
A generous slice, enjoyedwith a coffee from a Bristol Rovers mug
Please leave a comment with your thoughts.
The Cake Crusaders 