A zucchini cake (courgette cake) for those who have never made it before it is kind of a moist cake kind of reminds you of a carrot cake. This cake is phenomenal, bake it then glaze it with cream cheese frosting on top. To begin, weigh your zucchini(courgette) and chop it down excluding the seed until you get the weight that you will put in the recipe, which is pretty much the size of a standard courgette. Grab yourself a standard cheese grater and grate away your chunks of zucchini till you get nicely shredded even pieces of courgette. Grate the carrot to the courgette to add colour to it so that you have mountains of courgette and a bit of orange.

It is actually kind of wet once you grate it all together so what you would actually do is squeeze the water out of the courgette and the carrot. Let it just sort of soak into your chopping board or you can do it over a sieve and that is pretty much done. Chuck your courgette and carrots into a big old mixing bowl and then you going to dump in some dark brown sugar, you are also going to add in the oil you can use sunflower oil or vegetable oil if you like. Crack your eggs into a little dish and whisk them together so they are nice and beaten and add that into the bowl too.

You are then going to citrusy this as well so add in a little drop of orange extract as well, give that a good stir using a spatula and mingle and mingle together so it gets kind of mixed together and all the wet ingredients mix together, and then we get some self-rising flour with a little bit of baking powder and add in as well and fold them through. Carefully fold it in until every all that flour is in there is moistened and it is kind of thickened the mixture.

To bake, you just need to preheat your oven and then have your tin ready. Get your loaf tin and grease it with some butter and cut our a strip of parchment paper and line your loaf tin with it so that it sticks out both sides of the loaf tin. Pour all of the cake batter mixtures into the tin then give it a little tap on the counter to remove any air bubbles trapped in there. Bake for 45 minutes, while the cake is baking, prepare your cream cheese icing.

You will need some icing sugar into a large mixing bowl and then dollop in your cream cheese which is full fat cream cheese then zest in your orange, lemon and lime into the mixture you can also add in the juice to add even more zing. Mix it up using a wooden spoon and be sure not to overbeat it and place it in the fridge as we wait for the cake to finish baking. You can check your cake if it is ready by inserting a skewer at the centre and when it comes out clean your cake is fully baked.

Take it out of the oven and place it on a towel on a counter to cool then place it on a wire rack and take out the parchment paper and let it cool fully before icing it because, if you put the cream cheese too early it will just runoff. Once the cake is fully cooled spread the frosting on top and add even more zest on top just to multicolour it and make it look gorgeous. You could eat it now or put it in the fridge to firm up the icing before slicing it into nice thick loaf chunks. If you want when making the batter, you can add dried fruits and the cake will come out perfectly with even more flavours. Slice and enjoy.

Ingredients;

  • 400g zucchini, grated 1 carrot, grated
  • 3 eggs, beaten
  • 120ml sunflower oil
  • 1tsp orange extract
  • 200g dark brown sugar
  • 300g self-raising flour
  • 1tsp baking powder

Cream cheese frosting

  • 200g cream cheese
  • 100g icing sugar
  • Zest of ½ lemon, lime & orange

Instructions;

  1. Pre-heat your oven to 160c fan / 180c or equivalent, also line a loaf tin with some baking parchment.
  2. Grate the courgette including the skin using a standard grater, also grate the carrot in the same way. Squeeze out any of the moisture in the carrot and courgette using a sieve, you want to try and get rid of this fluid if possible.
  3. Place the grated pieces into a bowl, add the sugar, orange extract, eggs & oil and mix well – get all the wet ingredients really well mixed together.
  4. Add in the flour and baking powder, folding through, make sure it is all well mixed in and there are no traces of flour at the bottom, give the bowl a good old scrape around and pour into the prepared loaf tin.
  5. Bake in the preheated 350 degrees Fahrenheit oven ( 180 degrees C) for 45-50 minutes or until firm on top and a skewer inserted at the centre comes out clean.
  6. Let the cake cool before glazing it.