Chocolate and Zucchini Cake

I made chocolate and zucchini cake a couple of nights ago.

Work has been sort of bad lately, well not that bad, but I got staffed recently, and I haven't had the luck of being able to leap out the door at 6:00 pm, which all those sit around me seem to be able to do. I guess they've found a way to ward off the staffing fairy? I don't know. So I've been sitting in my empty bullpen along, after 8:00 pm trying to get stuff done, but not trying that hard since I know that if I finish something, they will just give me more to do... which means that even at 8:00 pm at night, I stay in the office and surf the web instead of being too productive.

Anyway, so I bought some zucchini last weekend in Chinatown (a sort of monstrous one actually), since I was planning to make zucchini pancakes-- I'd found a recipe in this book my college roommate gave me before I moved to New York, The New Cook, by Donna Hay.

The book has been sitting on my fridge for ages, and its actually very pretty, with lots of stylish photos of the dishes. Til now I haven't been able to bring myself to make anything in the book. Anyway, it turns out that the cookbook is pretty good, so I really wanted to experiment with dishes. I was going to make the zucchini pancake and the leek souffle. But I don't have an electric mixer and I couldn't figure out which vegetables were leeks when I went to Chinatown, since they don't label the produce. I mean, I know a leek is sort of like a big green onion, and they had those, but... were those really leeks?

Anyway, so I got home after work a few nights ago, and I decided I had to do something about this zucchini that was exploding in the fridgerator. So I decided to make a chocolate and zucchini cake, which I got from the blog Chocolate and Zucchini. Its a pretty wonderful food blog.

I spent about half an hour manually grating the zucchini--

that gave me about 3 cups of zucchini. I guess the sucker wasn't as big as I thought! (Should I buy a food processor?)


Then I mixed it all up, added flour, baking soda, baking powder, brown sugar and ground coffee.

Here is the flour combined with cocoa.


Everything mixed up.


Ingredients: baking soda, salt, baking powder


I added the butter to the brown sugar.


Tried to mix it together.


Some ground coffee-- I store it in a mason jar in the freezer.


Tossed in some eggs.


Then I put in the flour mixture cup by cup into the wet mixture.


The last step was to put in the zucchini.


More mixing.


I poured it into the pan and then I


sprinkled hazelnuts on top.

The cake turned out pretty yummy, sort of dense and rich. It really wasn't all that sweet though, I guess that amount of sugar isn't very high. I was sort of expecting something different I guess. In any case, its made an interesting snack for me the past few days at work-- for 4:00 pm lull, I guess.



Beats spending $4 on a snack from Starbucks..