Courgette/zucchini cake

A lady kindly gave us lots of courgettes.  Some of you call it zucchini.  Anyway we have been having lots of courgettes this week but there were still too many so we decided to make a courgette cake.  Yes, that's what I said a courgette cake!  Well carrot cake works so why not courgettes?

Some of my friends asked me for the recipe, so here it is.  The recipe I had would have fed the whole of the Arsenal team so I cut it down to the same proportions as I use for banana cake.  You need a 2 lb loaf tin for this recipe.

Ingredients:

2 eggs
125g/4oz of caster sugar (actually this was possibly a little too sweet so I might use less next time).
100g/4oz of melted margarine
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
200g/8oz of grated courgette (I left the skin on as it gave nice green flecks in the cake, but you could peel them if you wanted to)
200g/8oz of self-raising flour
100g/4oz ground nuts (I used almonds but you could grind any nuts for this in a food processor)
1 teaspoon of baking powder
2 teaspoons of cinnamon

Mix up the eggs, margarine,vanilla and grated courgettes in a mixing bowl.
Mix the flour, ground nuts, baking powder and cinnamon in another bowl and gradually stir that into the mixture (actually I just dumped it in and stirred like crazy like I do with the banana cake).

Put the mixture in a greased loaf time and put it into a pre-heated oven:

180C
350F
Gas mark 4

Leave from one hour.  I tested mine after an hour and it was still quite wet so I turned the over up from 180 to 190C and left it for a further 10 minutes.  It was done then and had the added advantage of crisping up the top.

I left it to cool for ages and ages and then tested it.

It was a nice moist cake with pretty green flecks from the peel.  I think the experiment was a success because my people ate it all, every crumb.

Give it a try, it seems you can make cakes out of vegetables and they turn out nice.  Now what to do with the all the cucumbers we were given???  Cucumber cake anyone???  Well maybe not!!