Ooph. Sometimes baking likes to put me in my place. Especially when I’ve procrastinated all week because I’ve been too busy to bake. And it gets to be Sunday afternoon and I’m like, Oh. I need to blog tomorrow? Hmm.
So I had some great plans to make this lemon zucchini bread with a top-secret streusel. It looked great going into the oven, and it was all downhill from there. The tops didn’t dome, the streusel looked all weird, the edges browned too much. Then when I finally turned the loaves out, the bottoms stuck. Aaaand the cake did not taste good.
Sigh.
To prevent myself from shame-eating the weirdly rubbery cake, I threw both loaves in the trash. Okay, really, I had to make my husband throw them away because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Such a waste of perfectly good butter and sugar.
Sigh squared.
There was no time to stop for mourning, but I went back to a traditional zucchini bread, partly because I knew it could be trusted, partly because I needed some comfort food to ease the pain of my loss.
So, while I hope to correct the zucchini lemon bread in the future, for today, we’ll just settle for some traditional zucchini bread. Do you slather yours with cream cheese or goat cheese like I do? You definitely should.
Zucchini Bread
yield: one 9×5-inch loaf
adapted from Martha Stewart
Cake Magic
1 large zucchini (about ¾ pounds)
1½ cups (180 grams) all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
¾ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
⅛ teaspoon ground cloves
¾ teaspoon salt
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (240 grams) packed light-brown sugar
⅔ cup (145 grams) vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
Preheat oven to 350°F. Brush Cake Magic onto the bottom and up the sides of a 9×5-inch loaf pan. (Alternatively, use cooking spray, or grease and flour the pan.) Grate zucchini on the large holes of a box grater until you have 1¾ cups (240 grams).
In a medium bowl, whisk together, flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices, and salt. In a large bowl, whisk together brown sugar, oil, vanilla, and eggs. Add flour mixture to wet ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula until combined. Stir in grated zucchini.
Pour batter into prepared pan, smoothing top with spatula. Bake for 45-55 minutes, until a toothpick or cake tester inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes, then turn out of the pan to cool completely. Slice and serve.
Source: siftandwhisk.com (defunct blog)
