Chocolate Courgette Cake

Hot on the heels of our success with the Courgette Cake recipe, but still with a glut of courgettes, last night we baked some chocolate courgette cakes. They were once a gain a success, although not much good for aiding my weight loss!

Here’s the recipe.

250g plain flour
375g caster sugar
65g cocoa powder
2 teaspoons bicarb of soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice
4 eggs
350ml vegetable oil
340g grated courgette
90g walnuts (optional)

We just mixed it altogether in a bowl and then divided it between 3 loaf tins before whacking it in an oven at 180ºC for 40-45 minutes and the result was delicious! OK, it’s more of a chocolate cake with courgette in it than a courgette cake with chocolate in it but no-one will complain about that!

Incidently, the Courgette Cake recipe post has become one of the most popular posts on this site this week – we can’t be the only people with a glut of courgettes!

It’s not often that I do ‘book reviews’ here, but last Christmas I bought Anna what was then the latest of Jamie Oliver’s books, ‘Ministry of Food‘. Anna wasn’t sure if she wanted it as the TV series that accompanied the book was all about getting people who had never cooked before to start cooking. Some of them didn’t even now how to boil a pan of water, so seeing as we do normally cook, we thought it might all be a little too simplistic. I bought it anyway despite these fears.

I’m glad I did, as it is actually a book full of recipes that we cook all of the time. We don’t follow them to the letter, but the general idea is there and the results are delicious.

The recipes that we cook regularly include ‘Good Old Chilli Con Carne’, many of the curries, especially the Korma and Rogan Josh (although we thoroughly combine and adjust these to suit our needs!), Creamy bacon and pea pasta, Fajitas, Black Bean stir fry and last might we tried the Moroccan Lamb with couscous.

One thing I will say about the recipes in ‘Ministry of Food‘ is that they don’t seem to have much in the way of vegetables in them. Certianly not as many as I would normally add to such dishes. Maybe this was deliberate in an attempt to make the recipes as simple as possible for newbies, but we always end up adding extra.

I usually add some potatoes to the curries, and carrots to almost every dish. Yesterdays dish, the Morrocan Lamb was supposed to have dried apricots in it, but we didn’t have any so instead I adding some carrots and red pepper. Not quite true to the dish, but delicious all the same.

As a recipe book to give you some ideas and the basics of some tasty meals then its perfect and we use it all the time.

I just hope that his next book ‘Jamie’s America‘ is just as good. (And my stomach agrees!)