Zucchini Nut Mini Bundts- Crazy Ingredient Challenge

The winning ingredients for this month's Crazy Ingredient Challenge were peanuts and zucchini. Simple enough. I thought of making some sort of salad since I told a friend that I'd try to have a raw meal one day soon. But eating cake always sounds better than eating a salad so I baked a cake instead.

There are people out there who will add zucchini to your desserts and then say, "You would never be able to tell that there's zucchini in here!" Those people are not telling the truth. Now I'll admit that I was not trying to hide the zucchini so I didn't grate it particularly fine. So you will definitely see lots of green in my cake. Even then, when you bite in, you can immediately tell that there's a little something green in there. It's not an overwhelming vegetable taste and you would not immediately go, "Is this zucchini? I taste zucchini!" But you would definitely say, "There's something in here. It tastes...hmm.... What is it?" It's far from unpleasant and since this is, at its base, a spice cake, there are lots of other flavours to tease out. Maybe if tiny shreds of zucchini are hidden in chocolate cake, those people might be telling the truth.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned Picky Nephew in a CIC post. Summary: Picky Nephew only willingly eats eggs and bread.  Everything else is a fight. And don't you dare try to get him to eat while he's watching TV or playing a game. He walked into the kitchen when I was baking, asked a few questions, and complained that I was baking with the peanuts instead of giving him them to eat. I guess he likes peanuts? One can never tell. When the cakes were finished, I offered cake to everyone except him. I hadn't frosted them yet and he will tell you that he likes cake but he will only eat the frosting. I wasn't going to waste my time. He actually looked up from his game and insisted on tasting it too. He knew about the zucchini and didn't mind.

Zucchini isn't easy to find here in Jamaica. It was quite the treasure hunt to find the one man in the market who grows zucchini. I can't wait to get my hands on some more so that I can jump on the zucchini bandwagon that rolls around every summer.

Zucchini Mini Bundt Cakes

Yield: 6 mini Bundt cakes or 12 cupcakes

adapted from Martha Stewart

Ingredients

180 grams flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

56 grams chopped peanuts

200 grams light brown sugar

88 millilitres oil

1 egg

1/8 teaspoon almond extract

280 grams grated zucchini

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease 6 one cup capacity mini Bundt pans or line a cupcake pan with liners.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, salt, and nutmeg. Stir in the chopped peanuts. In a separate bowl, whisk together sugar, oil, egg, and almond extract until thoroughly combined.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until almost combined. Next, stir in the grated zucchini.

Divide into prepared pans. Bake 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out clean.

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