Tag: unconventional

Courgette and apple cake – #GBBO inspired

This week the Great British Bake Off was all about unconventional baking – using flours that are wheat- or gluten-free, and using no dairy ingredients (like butter or milk). The final round saw the contestants bake a showstopper cake that was completely dairy free and contained a vegetable. They went for butternut squash, carrot or beetroot between them.

As we had a courgette in the veg box this week, and as I’ve been meaning to bake a courgette cake for some time now, I decided that this would be a great time to do it! We also had some cooking apples given to us by one of Tom’s work colleagues who has a glut of them in her garden, so I thought I’d combine the two in a cake with some spices too.

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I googled some courgette cake recipes and adapted one from BBC Good Food (I never follow a recipe exactly, and I wanted to add apple anyway). It came out very well, and actually rose more than I thought it might, given that vegetable cakes can be quite stodgy. It tastes like a fruit cake, but is lovely and moist from the grated courgette and apple. My boys all approved!

Ingredients

  • 2 large eggs
  • 125ml vegetable oil
  • 85g soft brown sugar
  • 1 medium courgette, grated
  • 1 cooking apple, grated
    • (combined weight of courgette and apple around 350-400g)
  • 300g plain flour
  • 2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ginger
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 150g sultanas

Method

  1. Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC (fan) and prepare a cake tin (grease and line if necessary – I use a silicone mould that doesn’t need this).
  2. Mix the oil, sugar and eggs together in a bowl, then add the grated fruit and veg.
  3. In another, larger bowl, mix the flour, spices, baking powder and sultanas until evenly distributed.
  4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and mix until well combined.
  5. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin/mould and bake for about an hour (vegetable cakes, according to Mary Berry herself, take longer to bake than ordinary cakes), until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
  6. Remove from the oven and let it cool.
  7. Eat as fresh as possible – you can also freeze this.

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