We’ve begun to harvest a couple of nice crops from our little veg patch now (apart from the strawberries, which provided a running fruit buffet for the local mice). We had some lovely new potatoes this week, and the courgettes are doing very well indeed.
So, what to do with them? They’ll be perfect in all manner of stir-fries and other savoury dishes, but we decided to start with a courgette loaf cake.
They’re incorporated into the batter as you would with carrots in the better known carrot cake. In this recipe they’re combined with walnuts, sultanas, nutmeg and cinnamon.
The resulting cake was a great success and has proved very popular here at H is for Home headquarters. We’ve had it for the past few days with our afternoon brew. It’s very moist as it is, but we’ve found that a scrape of butter works fantastically well. There’s not a huge amount of sugar in the recipe – but I think it works. It’s well worth giving this cake a try… with either shop-bought or home-grown courgettes.
Gardeners and allotment-holders often say that they have a glut of courgettes, so this is a perfect use for some of them. Also, if you have trouble getting vegetables into your kids, they’re wonderfully well hidden – they’ll never know!
You can be very versatile with this recipe. Substitute pecans for the walnuts. Swap raisins and/or prunes for the sultanas. Add a couple tablespoons of orange juice instead of the vanilla extract. Use honey or maple syrup as an alternative to the brown sugar… or you can sprinkle golden granulated over the top just before it goes into the oven, if you’d like it sweeter. Similarly, for additional sweetness, you could top it with a cream cheese frosting.
Click here or on the image below to save the recipe to Pinterest
Courgette cake
Ingredients
- 2 large eggs
- 125 ml/4fl oz vegetable oil
- 85 g/3oz soft brown sugar
- 350 g/12oz courgette coarsely grated
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 300 g/10½oz plain flour
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- ¼ tsp nutmeg
- ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
- ½ tsp baking powder
- 85 g/3oz walnuts roughly chopped
- 140 g/5oz sultanas
Instructions
- Heat your oven to 180ºC/350ºF/Gas mark 4
- Grease and line a 1kg/2lb loaf tin with baking parchment or paper liner
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk the eggs, oil and sugar
- Add the grated courgette and vanilla extract
- In another bowl, combine the remaining (dry) ingredients with a pinch of salt
- Stir the dry ingredients into the wet mixture, then pour into the loaf tin.
- Bake for an hour or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes away clean
- Allow to cool in its tin for a few minutes before removing it and leaving to cool completely on a wire rack
The cooked cake can be frozen for up to 1 month
It's delicious sliced and spread with a little butter