The zucchinis are coming . . . let them be cake

 I just finished typing up a recipe to send to the woman who’s in charge of programs for the new Snohomish Knitters Guild.  I’ll give my “Knitting, S.E.X., Chocolate, and a Couple of Math Skills” class/presentation at their October 13 meeting. I’m responsible for the hand-outs. They’re responsible for the chocolate. They can provide it in any form, but I send along a few of my favorite recipes in case anyone is inclined to bake. Today I added my friend Marilyn’s Chocolate Zucchini Cake to the mix. 

It occurred to me that since the zucchinis are starting their annual invasion of  the northern hemisphere, you might enjoy having this recipe as well. Australian and South African readers can bookmark this for the time when the invading hordes migrate their way.

An introduction to cakes

Cakes are easy to make. Recipes . . . not always easy to read. So I streamlined the process by thinking about it differently. I know this is a long explanation, but once you have the process down, you can make a cake about 3 times faster than if you laboriously follow most recipes.

You have basically 3, maybe 4, categories that go into a cake:

  1. A bowl of dry ingredients.
  2. A bowl with the fat (butter or oil), sugar and eggs that you “cream together.”
  3. A liquid of some sort that’s usually not much so you can hold it in a measuring cup. (I use a one or two cup liquid measuring cup.)
  4. You might have some solid things like nuts to add in at the end.

When I lived with “the guys” (a couple of husbands and a son, not all at the same time) I baked lots of cakes. This was my procedure:

  1. The night before I was going to bake I’d put the dry ingredients into a two to three quart bowl. For almost every cake, these are the same: flour+salt+baking soda and/or baking powder. A few other powders that might be included are unsweetened cocoa for a chocolate cake and some spices like cinnamon and cloves for a pumpkin or carrot cake. Take a fork or a whisk and gently stir them together so that everything is evenly distributed. Be gentle but thorough. Always put love into your food during the preparation.
  2. Put the butter in a slightly larger bowl so that it can come to room temperature overnight. I’ve already referred to the fact that I’m over-the-top in love with Challenge Unsalted Butter. That’s what I use. The recipe calls for oleo or margarine? I use my beloved butter. I store it in the freezer because unsalted butter is more perishable than salted. It needs a while to reach temperature and I leave it in its wrapping until it’s time to “cream” it. 
  3. Set out the number of eggs you’ll need. Put them in a bowl on the counter so that one doesn’t roll off and splat on the floor.
  4. Measure out the “wet” ingredients in a cup. It’s usually milk or buttermilk, occasionally water. 
  5. Go to bed and get a good night’s rest. Your ingredients are adjusting to room temperature in preparation for their willing sacrifice to your palate.

Show Time!

The above part of the  preparation was the Zen part of cake-baking, but when it’s time to put it all together you need to get on with it. Making a cake is an exercise in chemistry and once you start the next part of the process you need to move faster.

  1. Grease the pan(s) and turn on the oven, usually to 350º.
  2. Cream the butter. That means beat the heck out of it with an electric hand mixer (my tool of choice), full-sized mixer or wooden spoon. Using a spoon takes a lot of time and considerable arm strength, but I’ve done it. You’re getting the butter soft and incorporating air into it.
  3. Add the sugar a little at a time (about 4 different additions) to the butter and keep beating it. You’re fluffing it up some more. 
  4. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat after each addition. If the recipe calls for vanilla or some other extract I add it somewhere along in here.

Actually, you don’t have to hurry this creaming part. And this is the last time you’re allowed to “beat” anything vigorously. The reason is this: you don’t want your cakes to be tough. When you bake bread you knead the dough for a long time. This heavy treatment develops the gluten in the flour and that’s what gives bread it’s chewiness. It also helps to develop those good-sized holes. 

Cakes are meant to be tender and you want to treat the addition of the flour mixture more carefully because you don’t want to develop the gluten.

You now have five additions to make to your creamed mixture. After each one you will stir/beat the ingredients just until they’re incorporated (i.e. you can’t see any more powdery stuff or loose liquid). They are:

  1. 1/3 of the dry ingredients
  2. 1/2 of the liquid ingredients
  3. 1/3 of the dry ingredients
  4. 1/2 (the rest of) the liquid
  5. 1/3 (the rest of) the dry ingredients

You don’t have to measure these exactly. Just eyeball them. And because now you’ve combined the baking powder and or baking soda with the liquid which often is acidic, you have a chemical reaction going on. The bubbles are starting to form and you want to get it in the oven soon.

Your last addition is any nuts, raisins or chocolate chips or other tasty morsels. Fold them in gently, trying to get them pretty evenly distributed but precision is not necessary for deliciousness.

Put the batter in the pan(s) and place the pan(s) in the oven and don’t you dare open that oven until more than half of suggested baking time has elapsed or even longer. Otherwise your cake might “fall.”

A few more miscellaneous details . . .

  1. Don’t do the jig in front of the oven or drop heavy things on it or jiggle the cake while it’s baking. Otherwise, your cake might fall (see above).
  2. When making a cake, measure your ingredients carefully. This is probably the only circumstance in which I do this because it’s chemistry (and alchemy but we won’t go there).
  3. If I use a 13″ x 9″ pan and I’m going to leave the cake in the pan after it’s cooled and cut the pieces out of there, I just grease the pan. If I use a pan (or pans) and want to take the cake out after about ten minutes of cooling, I grease the pans and then line the bottom with parchment paper I’ve cut to size. Waxed paper will do.

Finally!!! Marilyn’s Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Oh so moist. Not very sweet but definitely a heavy chocolate hit. And, of course, sinlessly good for you because of the zucchini.

Before you even turn on the oven or grease the pans, melt together in a small bowl in the microwave:
4 oz unsweetened chocolate
1/2 cup of neutral-tasting oil like canola
Be careful. Do it in one minute intervals and stir it in between them. The oil heats up quickly and the chocolate squares will continue to melt as you stir. You don’t want to scorch it. You will add this to the creamed ingredients after all the eggs are beaten in. Let this cool down before you add it to the fat ingredients because you do not want to melt your butter or cook your eggs!

The dry stuff:
1 Cup flour
1/3 C unsweetened cocoa (Droste or Equal Exchange Organic are good brands. Ixnay on the most common grocery store brand. It’s bitter and tastes burnt to me . . . chemical processing . . . not so tasty.)
2 t baking soda
2 t baking powder
1 t salt

The wet stuff:
1/3 C buttermilk or sour cream (if you don’t have them on hand you can use regular milk (any % fat or nonfat) with a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar added to it)

The cream together stuff:
1/2 C butter
2 C sugar (regular granulated, use something that says it’s pure cane sugar. There are issues with adulteration that you want to avoid.)
3 eggs
1 T vanilla

Add at the end fold in:
3 C grated zucchini or summer squash
1/2 to 1 C chopped walnuts

This is thicker than most cake batters but don’t worry.

Easiest is to bake in a 13″ x 9″ pan for about an hour or until it tests “done.” That’s when the edges are starting to come away from the pan and when you stick a toothpick into the middle of the cake, it comes out clean. If it’s not done it will come out with sticky batter on it. If you use smaller pans, like two 9″ round cake pans, you bake it for less time, like 40 minutes or so.

When it’s cool frost with Cream Cheese Frosting  or any other favorite of yours.

Cream together 8 oz cream cheese and ½ cup soft butter (I prefer unsalted).  Add 2 t of vanilla. Slowly add about 4 cups of confectioner’s sugar, beating with an electric mixer after each addition. (I usually don’t measure. Just keep adding sugar until it’s the right consistency and taste.)

A Disclaimer

Except for eighth grade Home Economics with Mrs. Blair I never studied cooking in a school. Instead, I learned to prepare food from a gaggle of mentors (mostly Ma, Grandma and Great Aunt Shirley) and by doing it. So be forewarned. I may not explain things in the “right” way, but

  1. I make food that people like to eat. Lots of it. Lots of them. 
  2. No one has ever gotten sick from eating something from my kitchen. At least they haven’t told me about it if they have. Or maybe they haven’t lived to tell about it, but it’s likely I would have noticed their obituaries.

Yogurt cheese dressing instead of mayo

I seriously love fat. Not all types, but I’ve told my son that if I don’t get cremated I want to be embalmed in Challenge Unsalted Butter. I’m not sure it would work but I’d finally get my fill of it.

However, I don’t have as much muscle mass as I used to and I don’t always get as much exercise as I would like so I try not to have too much fat every day. One tablespoon of good, real mayo has 110 calories, of which 110 are fat. I love it and eat it but I often use something lighter when I’m dressing a dense salad. My favorite is nonfat yogurt cheese.

Nonfat yogurt cheese?!??

Yogurt is fermented milk. You take some milk from a goat, cow, camel, sheep, yak, whatever you’re milking that day, introduce some bacteria into it, keep it warm so they can multiply and bingo! In a few hours you’ve got yogurt.

Now that may sound gross to those of you who think that food grows in plastic containers, but if you stick around this blog long enough, you’ll toughen up. I was skinning rabbits with my grandpa when I was five and I raised beef cattle for 10 years. I’m not queasy when it comes to looking at real food sources.

There’s evidence that yogurt has been around for a long time. We can track it back about 12,000 years, and it makes good sense. Think about it. You milk the musk ox, leave the milk in a bowl near the hearth, bacteria floating by decide it’s an inviting place to land and the result is thick, tangy and delicious and it lasts a while. Refrigerated, it lasts a long time and it stays alive. Yogurt is a live food! This is a good thing.

Most of what’s sold in the U.S. as yogurt really just starts with yogurt. Then a whole lot of stuff is added to it: sugar, gelatin, high fructose corn syrup, fruit jams, pectin, pretend flavors, etc. Some of these “yogurt food products” have been heated in their processing in a way that kills the good bacteria. This is a bad thing. It’s not even honest to call them yogurt, but honesty is not a hallmark of the corporate food industry and, once again, I digress  . . .

You can buy yogurt with the same fat contents as milk. Whole milk or yogurt is 4% fat content. Then there’s 2%, 1%, and nonfat. Nonfat organic yogurt is a staple at my house.

It can be gussied up a number of sweet and savory ways and is nutritious and satisfying. Oh . . . and one cup equals 120 calories. That makes it 15 times less fattening than mayo.

About this yogurt cheese thing? 

1. Start with good, real yogurt. 

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2. Get out your tools: a strainer, coffee filter, and tall bowl.

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3. Nest the tools so:

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4. Add a cup or two of yogurt.

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5. Let it drain a few hours or overnight. The longer it drains the thicker it gets.

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This has drained for about six hours.

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When I turn it out on a plate you can see it’s more solid than regular yogurt.

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I can even slice it.

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6. Put it into a clean bowl.

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7. Add some curry powder.

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8. Mix well.

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And voila! You have the dressing for your chicken salad.