Wholewheat Zucchini Chocolate Cake

Wholewheat Zucchini Chocolate Cake

What do you do when you have lots of Zucchini and it is not a vegetable that you have ever cooked? It is not a vegetable common to the Indian cuisine. 

Courtesy programmes like Masterchef and Kitchen Rules global cuisine is no longer an uncharted territory. We get to see dishes made of stuff like Kale, Quail, Quinoa, Sumac, Brussel Sprouts and so on. It is extremely entertaining and informative to get to know about such varied food.

Staying in such cold climes as Leh has its own benefits. This kind of temperature is conducive for the growth of many fruits and vegetables that are not easily available in the plains. So I ended up with a basket full of zucchini. I surfed the internet looking for some good recipes to incorporate this vegetable. As usual the first thing that caught my attention was how easily it can be incorporated into cakes, cupcakes and muffins.

This cake recipe is from simplyrecipes.com. However I have made a few changes to suit my requirement.

Ingredients

2 ½ cups whole wheat flour

½ cup cocoa powder

1 ½  tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon powder

½ cup butter

½ cup oil

1 cup castor sugar

1 cup brown sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 tsp dried candied orange peels

3 cups coarsely grated zucchini

1 cup cashew nuts, chopped

½ cup milk

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees Celsius.

Sift together flour, salt, cocoa powder, cinnamon powder and baking powder.

Put the grated zucchini to drain in a colander.

Beat the butter and oil till well mixed. Add the two sugars and beat well till smooth. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the candied orange peels, zucchini and vanilla essence. Mix well.

Add the flour and milk alternately. Add the chopped cashews before adding the last batch of flour. Pour the batter into a bundt tin and bake for 1 hour 15 minutes. however as the temperature setting in each oven varies you must check the cake after an hour and further bake accordingly.