Developing a recipe for Zucchini Chocolate Cake

In the next few posts we're going to look at recipe development (since apparently you're all into that sort of thing). Specifically developing recipes for cakes. I'll go into a little more detail on the balancing of it all later, but here's a look at my process for developing a chocolate zucchini cake recipe.

If you have a garden with a zucchini plant in it, you understand the need to find new things to do with zucchini.

I started coming up with my recipe by choosing a flour amount. I decided two cups would probably make a cake size I'd be happy with. But since I wanted it to be chocolate, I substituted 1/2 cup of the flour for cocoa powder. To leaven that 2 cups of dry ingredients, I knew I needed about 2 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder, so that's what I wrote down next. Salt is sometimes a tricky ingredient. Most of us know that it needs to go in there somewhere, even in a sweet recipe, but have no idea how much to put in. Just the other day someone on my twitter feed was complaining about people writing recipes calling for "a pinch" of salt, because desserts really do need a bit more salt than that. I decided to start with 1/4 teaspoon, which is usually a pretty good bet. Now that my dry ingredients are out of the way, I move on.

To determine how much of the other ingredients I need, I first need to weigh my flour (in this case flour and cocoa powder). It weighs about 9 1/2 ounces. For a normal (shortened) American-style cake, I add an equal weight of sugar. I figure that the average cake in this style has 3-4 eggs. I go for 4 and figure that each weighs about 1.67 oz. Together that's about 6.7 oz of eggs. I subtract that from the weight of my flour (9.5 oz) to get the weight of liquid that I should add. I write down 2.7 oz of liquids. I decide to go with 2 oz of milk, and rely on my zucchini for the other .7 oz of liquid. I add 1 cup grated zucchini to the recipe.

Finally, I figure the fat. I want to use butter and a tiny bit of melted chocolate. In this style of cake, I want  a good amount of fat. I go for 6 oz of butter and about 1 oz of melted chocolate.

And there I have my initial, pre-testing recipe.

• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 cups AP flour
• 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 6 oz butter, softened
• 1 oz chocolate, melted
• 9.5 oz sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup zucchini, grated
• 2 oz milk

Then the steps were as follows: preheat the oven to 350, cream the butter, sugar, and chocolate, mix dry ingredients together, beat the eggs into the butter, add the zucchini, alternately mix in the dry ingredients and the milk.

About 20 minutes later, when it came out of the oven. I could tell the cake was going to be soft and moist. I frosted and decorated it and dug in. Then came time to change the recipe. My two critiques were that it wasn't quite chocolatey enough (although that was remedied with chocolate buttercream) and that there wasn't quite enough zucchini.

I think next time I'll up the zucchini to 1 and a half cups and up the cocoa powder to 3/4 cup, changing the flour to 1 1/4 cup.

More to come on developing your own recipes for cake (including sponge and angel food)!

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