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Hey, I'm John Canel and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making a fudgy, amazing chocolate zucchini cake. So, let's get started. First off, we have some prep to do. You'll want two to three zucchini, medium to large. It's very subjective. So, I recommend you get your scale out and weigh this because you want 475 g once this is done or 4 and 1/2 cups. And set your oven to 350 so it's nice and hot. Some people say a chocolate zucchini cake is a great way to hide zucchini. I say it's a great way to make a delicious chocolate cake. Just like pumpkin gives you a ton of moisture and a very soft cake, zucchini does exactly the
same thing. And because we're using chocolate, no other flavor is coming through. You're not tasting the zucchini. It's just giving you an impossibly soft and fudgy cake. And the chocolate buttercream that we're covering the cake in is so easy but luscious and silky. It's a really good cake. Perfect. All right, we're going to set this aside and get our batter together. This cake's using three 8in pans, so whenever it's convenient, give them a quick grease and add a parchment paper round to the bottom.
Now, in a large bowl, we're going to add 3 cups or 360 g of allpurpose flour. You want just enough flour to hold this cake together and give it structure. If you use too much, it'll be bready, it'll be drier, and honestly, flour does not taste delicious on its own. So, use your scale to get perfect results. If you don't have one at hand, that's fine. Just go ahead and fluff the flour, sprinkle it into your measuring cup, and level it off. If you scoop, you're adding too much. This chocolate cake needs some cocoa powder. 1 cup or 100 g of unsweetened natural cocoa powder. Cocoa powder is very light, so 100 g really seems like a lot. Here we go.
1 tbsp of baking soda. This needs an acid to react to. And in this cake, we have natural cocoa powder, which is slightly acidic, as well as brown sugar, also acidic. We're complenting this with 3/4 of a teaspoon of baking powder. We're using a lot of delicious zucchini here, but that's quite wet and dense, so you need those leavenning agents to fight against gravity and lift your cake up. This is optional, but I really want to amp up the chocolate flavor here. To do that, I'm using espresso powder. One and a half teaspoons will give you a more chocolatey flavor. You're not going to taste coffee. At least I don't think you will. It's
your body and I don't know what you I don't know how you taste things. And finally, for some balance, 3/4 of a teaspoon of salt. When you don't add salt to your desserts or add enough, you end up with a pretty flat taste. It doesn't have that depth. My scale is done for the moment. So, I'm going to set that aside and grab a whisk. You could also grab a copy of my new book, Preppy Kitchen, Everyday Baking. Just baking and all my favorite desserts. M. Give that a really good whisk so everything's nice and combined. And now we can set that aside and get the wet ingredients together.
1 and 1/2 cups or 300 gram of granulated sugar. We're using a combination of granulated and light brown sugar. This is going to give us a wonderful flavor because the light brown sugar has that little note of caramel in it. And aside from making the cake sweeter, it's also going to soften it. This cake is so melt in your mouth. Soft and fudgy. It's wild. And one cup or 220 g of light brown sugar. If you have any big rocks, just break them up. That way everything will mix nicely together and you won't have any sweet voids, which is what those rocks give you in your batter. Okay, perfect. This cake is going to live in the refrigerator most likely unless you serve it immediately and it's all devoured. So, you want it to have
that softness even when it's cold. 1 and 1/2 cups of a neutral oil will do that. You can use vegetable oil. You could use a rap seed oil, avocado oil. I've even made this cake with olive oil and it's delicious. We're going to use six eggs here, so get to cracking. And a best practice is to use a separate bowl and check for shells in between. By the way, if you like my videos, hit that subscribe button. There's two new recipes every single week. Look at that. Not going to sneak through on my watch. If we have any crunch in this cake, it would be from some optional add-ins like toasted walnuts or pecans. M not nutshells.
All right, six eggs. We're also using half a cup or 120 g of sour cream. This gives you a little bit of tang to complement the chocolate and it also helps to make the cake. So very soft. Using a weak acid in your cake is going to give you just a little bit of more tender crumb. And 1 tbsp of vanilla. It will really compliment the chocolate. Scale is definitely done. So we're going to whisk this up until it's nice and smooth. Break that sugar up. This makes a lot of batter in case you haven't noticed, but these layers are going to be so thick and luscious. I think the cake has the perfect proportion of cake to frosting. It's so good.
Whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk, whisk. This cake will last 4 to 5 days in the fridge. Just cover it up. Or you could freeze it for up to 3 months. This looks really nice and smooth. So, we're going to switch to a spatula and grab our zucchini. You just dump the zucchini in and we're going to get it nice and incorporated. The nice thing about this being chocolate as well, the dark color hides all the zucchini. You have to really look hard to find it. Nice. That's lovely. The wet's done. The dry is done.
It's time to combine the two. Add the wet to the dry. And we're going to fold it until it's almost combined. This is one of the oldest recipes on the blog and I made it originally because I loved chocolate zucchini cakes growing up. My mom loves making recipes a little bit healthier or incorporating vegetables. So, rejiggered it a little bit, made it my own, and I think I made a video for this like many, many years ago, but recently we updated the blog post just a bit and I thought, you know what, let me share this again. It's been lost to the depths of YouTube time. I think originally when I made it had a crazy chocolate sail on top or something like chocolate shard situation. Really
dig into the bottom of your bowl to find those pockets of flour. Those are the last things we want to just address. See, look at that. You'll find a lot of extra little hidden pockets hither and there just because there's so much batter here that is almost mixed and this cake is studded throughout with some little chocolate chips. So, we're going to grab 1 and 1/2 cups or 270 g of semieet chocolate chips. Fold those chocolate chips in until they're nicely distributed and the remaining flour is gone.
This adds a little bit more decadence to your cake. Really, it's not a ton of chocolate chips here. And if you didn't want to add those, you could omit or you could sub them out for some chopped toasted walnuts or pecans, which I think would be nice, too. One last scrape down. And we're ready to transfer this into our pans. Eyeball it if you want. I'm going to use a scale at the very end just to level things out. Okay. Get all that batter distributed. 1.2 1.16 1.27. Okay. There we go. That's good enough. This is optional, but for nearly any layer cake, I'm going to use cake strips. These are wet fabric strips that you just ring out. So now they're only damp and you
wrap around the edge of your cake. They insulate the side so they bake up nice and soft all over, but most importantly flat. They help the cake bake evenly. So each layer so beautiful and flat and perfect for stacking. I hate wasting batter, so the idea of trimming a cake is just not for me. You might be hearing the boys. They're home right now on holiday. So, they're definitely going to want a taste of this cake at the end of the day. My cake layers are ready to go into the oven 350 for 35 to 40 minutes. The centers will be springy when touched or a skewer will come out clean. In you go.
My cake layers are cooled. So, let's make a beautiful chocolate buttercream. Starting with some chocolate chips. One cup of semieet chocolate chips. That's 180 grams. Get combined with 1/3 of a cup of heavy cream. Pour that right in. And then we're going to microwave this to make a lovely silky ginache. Microwave in 30-second intervals, stirring in between until it's almost completely melted. My ganache looks nice and silky. And these are chocolate chips. They're not the best for melting. So, don't worry if you see a little lump hither and there. The residual heat will finish melting things as you set that aside. In the meantime, grab 1 and 1/2 cups of room temperature
unsalted butter. And we are going to pop that into our stand mixer and get to creaming. That's 282 g. As you can see, I can press in. The butter is not melty, but it's nice and soft. Also adding in half a teaspoon of salt just for some contrast. Let's cream this up medium speed for about 3 minutes. In the meantime, you can measure out 5 1/2 cups or 660 g of powdered sugar or at least make sure you have that in your kitchen at the ready. After 3 minutes, this is whipped and lovely. So, let's take this aside for a moment. And we're going to add 1/3 of a cup of cocoa powder here. You can use either cocoa powder, either the one used in the cake, or if you wanted to, you could use Dutch process. The only difference for
this is really going to be the color. If you use Dutch process, it'll be a darker, more fudgy cocoa color. Both will taste delicious. And that's of course 33 g. Mix on low so you don't have a cocoa cloud. Just going to scrape the bowl down so we can get some even coverage here. On the inside, it looks chocolatey and beautiful. On the outside, pale. Okay, that's great. once your cocoa is mixed in, we can begin adding our sugar in about a cup at a time on low. And I have a/3 of a cup of cream here.
Just alternate with a splash of cream after every cup. This is your frosting, by the way. So, if you want it to be a bit more slack, you can add more cream. If you like it thicker, you can add less. And right now you see we have what's a nice chocolate frosting. It tastes good, but won't it taste so much better with a luscious ganache added to it? I think so. Once cooled, this ginache can go right in. Look at that. And by the way, if you like less sweet frostings, you could just make a ganache, let it cool, whip it in your mixer, and then frost your cake with that. Or just cover your cake completely in a ginache. My mom used to do that all the time. Super
common in Europe. Anyways, you can make a ganache. Mix on low. Okay, this looks like magic. You can tell it has a totally different consistency now. It's almost like Swiss mering buttercream, but so much more fudgy. The kitchen ghosts are after me. I swear. Okay, anyways, scrape the bowl down. See, the thing is, it's okay if you make a mess in the kitchen, as long as you clean up after yourself and you make something delicious.
Once mixed, increase to medium and mix for about 2 minutes. Then, grab your favorite cake plate, a piping tip, a piping bag if you're doing that, and we can get to work. Whipped to perfection. This is unbelievably good. It's one of my favorite frostings. Let's assemble this cake. Reserve one cup of your frosting. This is going to be for dollops. Set that aside. And now we can build our cake up. This is a lot of frosting. It will fully frost the cake. I think today I might do a naked edge. I like the way it looks. In which case you can have a lot of frosting in between each layer,
but conservatively one cup in between each layer is good. Smooth this out into an even layer. Plop the next layer on and center it up. Another cup of frosting. Smooth that out as well. very silky frosting. Smooth this out. And then work it down the sides. The frosting is so smooth and luscious. This cake is quite jiggly. So, just be careful that it doesn't start leaning. If it does, just shove it back into place. For example, I can tell it's leaning right now. So, just a little shimmy like that.
A bench scraper is your best friend here. So, let's straighten up the top. Give it a nice smooth. So, I had reserved my frosting, but it was looking a little foamy. If you notice that, just pop that back into your bowl and give it a good mix with your spatula until it looks nice and silky. You want a silky consistency, not foamy. And you can always do a test dollop onto a flat surface. Perfect. Nice and pointy. So, just pipe that out. So simple, but it's really pretty. This needs to set for about half an hour so it firms up enough to cut. If you have any extra frosting, honestly, half the people in my family like this amount and half want mega frosting. So, just reserve this and you can pipe a little
dollop extra on their piece. This does not get refrigerated though if you're serving the same day. Once set, give your cake a slice. And just like that, it's ready to enjoy. Hey, Lachlin. Uh, could I interest you in some chocolate zucchini cake? I will not like it. I would love it. Okay, let's have it. Okay, take a bite in three, two, one. What do you think? Best cake ever. M. This cake is so soft and fudgy and just melts in your mouth with this luscious chocolate frosting. I hope you get a chance to make this delicious recipe. And if you like my videos, hit
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