Cake

The anticipated courgette glut has yet to materialise. I seem to be keeping up with all that the plants produce. As a result I had to save up a couple of days harvest to get the 1lb required to make the Chocolate Courgette Cake in the Five-a-day Fruit and Vegetable Cookbook . The cake is a tray bake and the recipe was easy to follow. It makes a very moist cake which went down very well with my afternoon decaf. I'm not sure how to describe the flavour. You can taste the chocolate and the allspice and you can also taste the courgette but it's flavour is not so obvious. I had to eat some courgette by itself tonight just to be sure I wasn't imagining it! The whole thing has a wholesome sort of taste and I will definitely make it again. Alarmingly the recipe states it serves four to six. Maybe six navvies or growing teenagers! I cut mine into 16 portions and find 1 is quite enough. By the way the recipe is virtually identical to that for Chocolate Zucchini Cake given in What Will I Do with All Those Courgettes?. The latter uses sour cream or yogurt in place of the milk.

If you would like to know a little more about the Five-a-day Fruit and Vegetable Cookbook then read on. The book, which runs to a little over 500 pages, begins by explaining the size of a portion and how many times you can count it a day. For example spuds don't count towards your five-a-day and no matter how much fruit juice you drink a day it only counts as 1 portion. The same goes for dried fruits. The fruits and veggies are then presented in groups (stone fruits, berries and currants, squashes etc). Each fruit (or veg.) in the group is described and information is given about its nutritional value and how to buy, store, prepare and cook it. This is followed by recipes incorporating the various fruits (or veggies!) from the group. It is sumptuously illustrated with photographs throughout.