Chocolate Chunks and Courgette Loaf

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There's nothing like chocolate for cheering a day up. I was given a large bar for Easter, so wanted to stretch it out by using it in a cake. I love loaf cakes, and this is one of my favourites. It uses courgettes as well as chocolate, and I just happened to have one medium sized one that needed using up. It also uses soft brown sugar, a bonus as I've no more caster sugar!

You need: 2 eggs, 80ml honey, 120ml sunflower oil, 100g soft light brown sugar, 2 tspn vanilla exctract, 1/2 tspn baking powder and 1/2 tspn bicarb, 1 heaped tspn coffee granules, 45g cocoa powder, 210g plain flour, 2 small courgettes or 1 medium grated, and 200g dark chocolate cut into chunks and divided into  2 x100g portions

Preheat oven 170C/gas4           Grease and line a 200g loaf tin

Whisk together the eggs, honey, oil, sugar and vanilla. Sift together in another bowl the flour, bicarb, baking powder, coffee and cocoa: mix together then gently add to the egg mixture. Fold in the courgettes and half the chopped chocolate.
Pour into the tin and scatter the other half of the chocolate over the top.
Bake for about an hour [N.B.turning down the heat if necessary to stop the cake burning, as I nearly had a burnt cake!]
Cool in the tin for 15 mins then finish cooling on a wire rack.






The cake is full of chocolate flavour,and I love the pockets of molten chocolate chunks.  It's lovely soft moist crumb comes from the courgettes. A different sort of chocolate cake, but one of my favourites.

Comments

Phil in the Kitchen said…
That would cheer anyone up. Courgettes usually keep a cake nice and moist but they can make the colour a bit odd - that clearly won't be a problem here.
29/4/20 3:08 pm
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