Green Monsters

I warned you that it was zucchini season, didn't I? We currently have 10 zucchinis hogging precious real estate in our fridge. Two of them are enormous enough that we could get a game of wiffle ball going out back and the person on deck could have their own zucchini bat to swing around too.

I'm not really amped about backyard baseball though. I'm excited about chocolate cake. Actually, at the moment, I'm mourning my empty plate...but my taste buds are still busy quivering with joy and forgiving me for cutting anything dessert-like out of my life for five months.

A Piece of Chocolate Zucchini Cake

Fun fact: this cake, which just pulled into the lead on my all-time-favorite-cakes list, has 3 cups of zucchini in it. I'll admit I was highly skeptical when my mom announced she was making a chocolate zucchini cake with homemade cream cheese frosting earlier today. The pillow of cream cheese sounded like a winner, but why would you want to add three cups worth of vegetable to an otherwise perfectly good recipe for chocolate cake? Don't get me wrong, I love vegetables...but I like them mixed up in a salad, shoved into a pita, dipped in hummus, or neatly arranged next to my protein and my carbohydrate on my dinner plate.

It didn't take long for my vehement oppositions to change into feeble protests...and when the smell of rich dark chocolate started drifting up the stairs, all pretenses were dropped. I followed my nose into the kitchen and turned on the oven light just to make sure the cake wasn't green or anything suspicious like that. Fun fact: zucchini cake masquerades as a regular chocolate cake (only better). Zucchini is something like 95% water, meaning when it's combined with all the standard baking ingredients it loses its flavor altogether and makes for an incredibly moist cake batter. This is the kind of cake that makes you want to reach back in to rescue the crumbs that cascaded down when you cut your piece. This is the kind of cake that makes you want to run your finger along the edge of the base and lick it clean when nobody is looking.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake, Minus Some Slices

Chocolate Zucchini Cake Recipe:
Serves 8 


Ingredients:
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
3 eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 cups sifted all-purpose unbleached flour
1/3 cup cocoa
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup buttermilk or sour cream
3 cups coarsely grated zucchini
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Instructions: 
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Melt the chocolate and oil in a small saucepan over very low heat.
Cream the butter until light; add the sugar, eggs, and vanilla.
Beat well. Add the melted chocolate and mix well.
Sift together the dry ingredients and stir them into the batter with the buttermilk.
Mix the zucchini and nuts into the batter.
Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans.
Divide the batter between pans.
Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
Cool the cake completely before frosting with whipped cream or your favorite frosting.

Our Favorite Frosting Recipe: 


Ingredients:
3/4 cup butter at room temperature
8 ounces cream cheese at room temperature
4 cups confectioner's sugar

Instructions:
Cream together the butter and cream cheese until the mixture is light and fluffy.
Slowly add the confectioners' sugar until well-blended, using more sugar if necessary to get a spreading consistency.

As if chocolate cake wasn't exciting enough, today Mom and I also discovered a new kitchen appliance that isn't atrociously expensive (unlike the Breville toaster I'm itching to buy for my little condo back at school). A julienne peeler is such fun. It looks a lot like a vegetable peeler, only there's a sharp toothed blade that's ideal for cutting vegetables into skinny strips. Somehow, changing the appearance of even the most unexciting produce (i.e. the carrot) makes a world of difference when it comes to digging in.

Julienne Peeler, Source

With the Julienne peeler in hand, Mom found another easy but tasty recipe to add to my recipe book (only recipes that I can make with confidence and without 500 ingredients make the cut). Zucchini Slaw, from Sara Foster's Fresh Every Day: More Great Recipes from Foster's Market cookbook, is perfect picnic food. We ignored Foster's suggestions for dressings and piled grilled chicken strips (that had been marinated in Greek dressing) on top. This dish was wonderfully fresh, colorful, summery, and light. It also was awarded big points because the recipe itself didn't require any cooking and only took 10 minutes to pull together!

Zucchini Slaw Salad

Zucchini Slaw Recipe (doubles as instructions too):

Serves 4 to 6

2 medium zucchini, ends removed and cut into 2-inch julienne

2 yellow summer squash, ends removed and cut into 2-inch julienne

2 carrots, cut into 2-inch julienne

4 scallions, julienned (white and green parts)

1 red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and julienned (optional)

1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves

Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Now...what to do with the other green monsters I can already see peeking out from under those comically large green leaves? Perhaps I'll make this zucchini and ricotta galette, this roasted zucchini pesto, this zucchini parmesan, this zucchini carrot cake, or these chocolate chip zucchini brownies. 

Maybe I should start keeping an eye out for cucumber recipes too...seeing as there's 15 of them cozying up to the bags of zucchini on the produce shelf. I'm a little worried I used up all my creativity on zucchini season...

Starting from Scratch

A few days ago (see here), I listed chocolate chip cookie dough brownies as my current craving. Usually, my longings for specific sweet things are fleeting (although I'm never able to completely disable my sweet tooth). Every couple of days, I'll scroll through my bookmarked dessert recipes (found mostly through the world's most addicting website, TasteSpotting) and delete various cheesecakes, cookies, blondies, crumb bars, cupcakes, etc. Weeding out my favorites is a futile exercise since the websites on the chopping block are almost immediately replaced with links to new yearnings...but I have to fool myself into thinking that I'm keeping the volume down somehow.

You should see me in the bakery section at Whole Foods. I have the attention span of a goldfish - my eyes dart from the gelato to the flowery cupcakes and to the chocolate covered nuts, before scanning over the mini cheesecakes (how cute are those?) and briefly zooming in on the lemon bars. In less than five seconds, I bounce from having to have one thing to completely forgetting about it in favor of another.

But I couldn't get RecipeGirl's chocolate chip cookie dough brownies out of my favorites folder (or out of my mind). As I was lacing up my shoes for a tempo run, I thought about these brownies. In the middle of a bike workout, I thought about these brownies. At the end of a torturous introduction to the weighted jump rope, I thought about these brownies. Today I caved in, I decided to check my judgemental self at the kitchen door and bake these babies. To my pleasant surprise, these brownies were so good that they didn't just muffle the little voice that always says well there goes that workout...they stifled it altogether!

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownies

Today I hung up my sous-chef hat and actually learned how to cream butter, how to crack an egg, how to run the electric mixer, and how to spread batter with confidence (echoes of Brother #3's coaching). Mom and Brother #3 supervised the baking of these brownies, but I was the one who got my hands gooey, my camera sticky, and my clothes covered in flour. It should come as no surprise that I had a minor panic attack due to the mess all over the counter, but also that I loved the exactness and precision associated with baking.

My 1st Lesson (And 2nd Workout): Finely Chopped Unsweetened Chocolate

Melted Chocolate...Mmmm

Mixing Butter and Brown Sugar, Eggs and Vanilla Extract 

Mixing Melted Chocolate and Flour

Baked Brownie Layer (35 Minutes at 325 Degrees F)

Egg-less Cookie Dough with Mini Chocolate Chips

Before Spreading the Cookie Dough Layer

Ready for the Fridge

Semi-melted Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips (for Drizzle)

Final Product (Looking Distinctly Homemade!)

I used a great recipe but I wished I had known two things beforehand:
-For neat brownie squares, it's a good idea to run the knife under hot water after cutting each column/row
-If you use butter instead of shortening to make the chocolate drizzle (as we did), the drizzle comes out a lot thicker and is significantly harder to squeeze out in a pretty zigzag pattern

Zigzag Chocolate Drizzle Fail (But Fudgy and Sweet Nonetheless)