Saturday, June 7, 2008

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

My oven died last weekend, so I haven't been baking this week. Which is okay, it allowed plenty of time to peruse my new cookbooks and think about all the new recipes I'm gonna try.

New stove was just delivered and hooked up (hooray for responsive landlords!), so I'm back in business. You'd think I would have used a bake-free week to catch up on the stuff I hadn't posted about yet but, well, I didn't. So here's update #1:


CHOCOLATE ZUCCHINI CAKE
Oh, yum, was this delicious! And I've got a bunch of pieces in the freezer for future cake nights, hooray!

This will be a short post, 'cause I just wanna boast that for once I actually followed a recipe exactly as it appears in the book! Well, almost exactly: I used a combo of yogurt and milk instead of buttermilk, and I didn't have brown sugar, so added a teaspoon of molasses with the raw cane sugar I had on hand. But that's it. Hardly counts as substitutions, compared to the liberties I usually take. Which might be why this turned out so good!

Want the recipe? Turn to page 426 of the King Arthur Flour Co.'s WHOLE GRAIN BAKING cookbook (which I am totally loving, wanna try everything!).

I baked mine in a 12-cup bundt pan. A 10-cup size as called for would probably be better, but 12-cup is what I've got, and it didn't turn out to be horribly too big so all's well.

Only thing I'd do differently next time is use smaller chocolate chips. I used Ghiradelli bittersweet, but they're kind of large and didn't distribute well in the batter. I think mini-chips would work better.

This is a great chocolate cake recipe... although (eeeeh, grimace) I do think the chocolate flavor needs be just a little more intense before I can call it perfect. I'll keep looking. But I will make this again.

I didn't frost this, BTW (feeling lazy), just whipped up some heavy cream with a little vanilla extract and a generous amount of confectioner's sugar. Very nice combo with the choc cake. If you're clever, like me, you will make a little too much of the topping (oops!) because everyone knows whipped cream doesn't keep well even thickened with conf.sugar, and that is a very good reason for putting leftovers in your morning coffee the next day.

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