The very best zucchini recipe ever...

It's about that time-- when everyone and their mother has way too much zucchini and people are either trying to invent creative uses for it or have just given up and are composting it. Even in this poor year for gardening, I have some small zucchinis developing on my plants and am hoping for a bumper crop. I can't wait, because I have the perfect solution for zucchini overload, and I've successfully altered it to a delicious allergy-free version. In fact, it may even be better than the original!

I introduce the Chocolate Zucchini Cake. It's been a favorite of mine since childhood, and now I always grow ample zucchini during summer so I can freeze it for use throughout the year. The zucchini in the recipe serves to moisten the cake-- it doesn't actually taste like zucchini. People who don't like zucchini won't even know the difference. I promise.

The original recipe (which is the first recipe, I may add, in my handwritten cookbook of personal favorites) calls for wheat flour, butter, eggs, and milk. I avoided this recipe last year because that's an awful lot of substitutions to try all at once. This year my baking skills have improved and I decided to see what happened. I thought the adventure itself made a decent blog entry: the process of altering a recipe to be allergy free could be instructional. So here goes.

Instead of wheat flour, I used a combination of half oat and half barley flour. I used palm oil (available online or sold as shortening in the health food section) for the butter, egg replacer as directed on the box for the eggs, and rice milk instead of cow's milk. While the result tasted absolutely heavenly, I ended up with a very, very moist cake that was still, somehow, crumbly. Perhaps there isn't such a thing as "too moist" as long as the cake is set-- this was a matter of debate in my family-- but the combination made it difficult to dish up and just not quite perfect.

How did I solve this? I know two ways to make it less crumbly: add more binder to hold the ingredients together, which in this case was an extra egg's worth of egg replacer, and increase the ratio of barley flour to oat flour. Barley flour leads to a tougher consistency, and oat flour to a crumbly texture. To make the cake a little less moist, I added extra flour. Since I wanted to increase the barley to oat ratio, I just added extra barley flour.

The second time I made it, the result was perfect! I served it at our Fourth of July picnic. No one suspected it was allergy free unless I told them, and zucchini haters unknowingly tried it and loved it. I recommend it to anyone. Grow extra zucchini, and when you tire of eating it steamed and run out of creative alternatives, try this. I know you'll enjoy it too!

Perfect Chocolate Zucchini Cake

1/2 c palm oil (you could try coconut oil)
1/2 c canola oil
1 3/4 c sugar
3 eggs worth of egg replacer
1 t vanilla
1/2 c rice milk
1 1/4 c oat flour
1 1/2 c barley flour
4 T unsweetened cocoa powder (I think imported Dutch cocoa is best!)
1 t baking soda
1 t cinnamon
1 t cloves
1/2 t salt
2 c grated zucchini (double if frozen: thaw and drain before use)
1/2 bag allergy-free chocolate chips or carob chips
1/2 c chopped walnuts or pecans OPTIONAL

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a 13" x 9" pan with palm oil. Cream palm oil, canola oil, and sugar. Add egg replaces, vanilla, and milk; blend. Add dry ingredients and stir until blended. Stir in zucchini. Pour into the prepared pan. Sprinkle chocolate chips on top. Bake at 350 for 40 to 45 minutes.