This is how it alllllll begins…
Yeah, I don’t grow my own zucchini. Not even when I had a nice big yard. Apparently zucchinis are very easy to grow, and you never get just a few. You get a LOT. And that’s when you start leaving them at people’s front doors, ringing, the doorbell, and running away.
When I found a lovely bunch of zucchini at my door (um, two or three years ago) I knew there was only one thing to do: haul out this Winkler classic!
My mom had bought one a long time ago — I guess whenever this cookbook was being sold, maybe in the late 1980s? And ever since that time, our family had been enjoying zucchini chocolate cake. I wasn’t aware that there were other ways to eat zucchini until I became an adult and fell in love with ratatouille, and everyone around me started using spiralizers make “noodles” out of zucchini (I just used my veggie peeler to do this).
But I think we can all agree that the best use of zucchini is to throw it into a chocolate cake batter!
Next thing you know, it’s a very delicious chocolate cake!
I love zucchini. Mostly because it always reminds me of this hilarious summer on the farm when our kitchen counter was flooded with zucchini. It was the Summer of Zucchini. Not only was our garden producing vast amounts of zucchini, but so was everyone else’s. Zucchini was being left for us everywhere. It became a tad overwhelming. I spent hours shredding zucchini and putting it into little freezer bags in two-cup portions because THAT is precisely how much shredded zucchini you need for a batch of zucchini chocolate cake. But we didn’t stop at just chocolate cake. That summer, my mom threw zucchini into EVERYTHING. At one point she also used it to make fake pineapple, and used that in her sweet and sour meatball recipe. Overall the family voted that she not do that again — she had gone too far! But to be honest, I liked it.
Frankly, I think the family just wanted a lot more chocolate cake. I mean, everyone knows zucchini chocolate cake is the tastiest kind.
