The healthy zucchini chocolate cake

A friend’s wife decided he needed to get healthy. The first step was to wean my poor friend off the ever-so-addictive sugar. This created a challenge for social events: could I make a cake that his wife and his sweet tooth would cope with?

This cake—a cake with no sugar, a little honey, and lots of zucchini and cocoa—is a sugar-free mud cake. It was our first response to the challenge.

You could argue that honey is no better than sugar, not to mention the issues around white flour. But the aim is to ease my friend into a healthier approach to life. And anyway, yellow-box honey, which we use, has a GI of round 35, so as far as sweeteners go, it’s less bad than other things we could be using.

Sure its still cake, but it’s a healthy cake on the cake scale of things.

Zucchini chocolate cake: rich, chocolatey, but not-too-sweet for a semi-healthy treat

• Servings: 10-20 people
• Time: 1 hour
• Difficulty: easy
• Print

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla
• ¼ cup of honey
• a pinch of salt
• 1 cup of flour
• ½ cup of cocoa powder
• 1½ teaspoons of bicarb soda
• 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon of ground cardamom
• 2 cups of grated zucchini

Directions

1. You can just tip everything into a large bowl, mix it well, then bake it for a bit over half an hour at 160°C (325F). But it works slightly better if you mix the wet and dry ingredients separately, then combine, as below.
2. Grate the zucchini and set aside.
3. Combine the wet ingredients into a large bowl.
4. Combine the dry ingredients into another bowl. Sift the cocoa and flour together first to remove any lumps from the cocoa powder.
5. Tip the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients. Mix well, then fold in the grated zucchini.
6. Pour the mixture into a 23 centimetre (9 inch) greased cake tin.
7. Bake at 160°C (325°F) for 30 to 40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Notes

The original recipe had a whole tablespoon of vanilla. We use the straight extract, and a whole tablespoon would be rather overpowering, so we’ve put only a teaspoon in here. It also had 2 tablespoons of applesauce, which isn’t really needed as our zucchinis are homegrown, sweet and have a lot of water in them (sometimes, we need to squeeze some water out). If your mix is dry, you can add the apple sauce back in, or some other liquid.

Source: from the Yummly website: A healthy chocolate cake with zucchini

Zucchini chocolate cake

Submitted to: Fat Tuesday, Tell ’em Tuesday