Chocolate Zucchini Birthday Cake

            This week was my partner's birthday, so I decided what a perfect opportunity to break out my cake baking skills. I normally prefer to bake small things, like muffins, cookies or slices, because I feel like I understand how they react and bake in the oven.

I always get a little scared when I’m baking a cake that the middle will just not cook but I’ll burn the outside! This fear comes from a very bad run with trying to recreate a healthy banana bread recipe, but I have recently solved that dilemma so this should be a piece of cake! (Pun intended)

            The first thing I knew I wanted to have in this birthday cake was a chocolate flavour. Simply because I know he’ll love that, but from there I had so many ideas of what else I wanted to add in, that I just couldn’t decide. In the end I chose to use the beautiful zucchinis that had grown from his sisters vegetable garden. These add in a sneak hit of vegetable goodness, but will also help to add an awesome texture to the cake and stop it from becoming dry.

Zucchini & Chocolate Birthday Cake

Plant based - Gluten Free - Dairy Free

Makes: 1 cake, 8- 10 serves

Time: prep- 15 minutes

Cooking- 30 minutes

Ingredients:

- 1 1/3 cup almond meal

- 1 cup buckwheat flour

- 1 tsp baking powder

- 1 tsp baking soda

- ½ cup cacao or carob

- ½ tsp cinnamon

- ¼ tsp nutmeg

- Pinch of Himalayan pink salt

- 2 flax eggs (1 egg= 1 tbsp flaxseed meal + 3 tbsp water)

- ½ cup coconut oil, melted

- ½ cup rice malt syrup

- 1/3 cup almond milk

- 2 medium zucchini, grated

Chocolate Peanut Butter Icing (optional):

-2 tbsp cacao powder or carob powder

-2 tbsp rice malt syrup

-4 tbsp coconut oil, melted

-2 tbsp natural peanut butter (could swap for any nut or seed butter)

Method:

- Preheat your oven to 170C, and lightly grease a medium cake tin with coconut oil.

- Grate the zucchini and squeeze as much of the liquid from it as you can, either with a muslin/cheese cloth or through a sieve.

- Combine all the wet ingredients together in one bowl and all the dry ingredients together in another. Then mix them both mixtures together; making sure that it is all well combined.

- Transfer the mixture into your cake tin and pop it in the oven. Cook the cake for 30 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

- Allow it to cool in the tin for 10 to 15 minutes, before turning it out into a wire rack to cool.

- While the cake is cooling you can put together the chocolate topping. Place all of the ingredients into a bowl and stir until combined. Once the cake has cooled slightly pour the topping over the top of the cake, the topping smoothes out better when the cake is still a little warm. You could add extra toppings here, like coconut chips, chopped nuts or fresh berries.

- I recommend keeping this in an airtight container in the fridge, but I also think it tastes a lot better when its at room temperature. So take the out of the fridge a little while before serving.

Let me know how you go if you do try this out yourselves, or post a picture on instagram with the hashtag #cinnamoncourtney so I can see all of your recreations!

‘I don’t make assumptions’ – Don Miguel Ruiz