I was looking for an easy cake to make for work on Saturday when I saw this recipe in my Passion for Baking book and since I still had zucchini shredded and ready to go from my last zucchini bread, this fit the bill perfectly. I was a bit skeptical of this cake, because the combination of ingredients just doesn't sound all that good, but for the sake of using up the zucchini and the sad orange I had, I was willing to give it a try. JB even commented that it was one of the worst sounding recipes he had ever heard of and the only thing that could possibly make it worse was to say it had catfish in it too.
The surprise wasn't that the cake tasted good though, the surprise was that it didn't taste like much of anything. It was moist from the zucchini, but didn't taste like zucchini bread. It had the zest of an orange in it, but it didn't really taste orangy at all. There was only 3 oz of chocolate in the cake, so it didn't even really taste like chocolate. It was just a basic, moist, nondescript kind of cake that probably even JB would have liked.
The sad thing is that tomorrow when I put the cake out at work for my coworkers to enjoy, I'm just going to call it a bundt cake because if I gave the title of it I doubt most of them would go near it. *sigh*
Cake:
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup veggie oil
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs
3 oz semisweet chocolate melted
2 tsps vanilla extract
zest of a small orange
1/2 cup milk
2 cups shredded zucchini
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 1/2 tsps baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 12-cup bundt pan.
In a mixing bowl, cream butter and oil with sugar until well blended. Add eggs, 1 at a time, and then the melted chocolate, vanilla, orange zest, and milk. Stir in shredded zucchini. Fold in flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon and blend until batter is thoroughly combined. Spoon batter into prepared pan.
Bake approximately 1 hour or until cake springs back when gently pressed with fingertips. Let cake cook in pan 15 minutes and then invert onto a serving plate.
Dust with powdered sugar and/or cocoa powder.
4 comments:
i'm not a picky eater--far from it! i just have a problem with fruit + chocolate combinations....and, okay, zucchini + chocolate isn't high on my list of favorites, either. but BACON chocolate zucchini cake, well, i'll be first in line :)
--jb
Hmmm. I just made a chocolate orange cake but I never would have added zucchini! It doesn't sound like an awful combo though...was it a good basic cake recipe, or was its "blandness" disappointing?
Looks yummy! I do love zucchini bread.
Chocolate and zucchini is fantastic but now add the component of orange and I think I just died and went to heaven.
The blandness was the disappointment.
But unlike most recipes I'm not even sure how to remedy it. More chocolate? More cinnamon? More orange? The recipe said you could dust it with cocoa powder and/or powdered sugar, which is what I did, or you could top it with a chocolate orange glaze which I think would have upped the flavor quite a bit. However, I like my cakes to stand on their own, not depend on frosting or glaze to rescue them.
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