Zucchini Cake with Macademias and Chocolate

This zucchini cake from Miriam's fabulous blog Once Upon A Cakestand is just great! The smell of the spices is pretty strong, but I like that a lot. If you don't want the spices to come through so strongly, slightly reduce the amount of cinnamon and nutmeg. You can also substitute the macademias with other nuts, or use raisins or dried cranberries instead of the chocolate chunks. Miriam suggests that "if you want to be really kinky, pour over some chocolate glaze". Well, talk to me about kinky! Since the recipe yields two loaves, I decided to cover one with cream cheese frosting and the other with my favourite chocolate glaze! One for this weekend's afternoon tea and the other for my office mates tomorrow.

Recipe
(slightly adapted from Once Upon A Cakestand)

3 eggs
250ml olive or vegetable oil
160g sugar
about 280g grated zucchini
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
330g flour
4 teaspoons cinnamon
a generous pinch nutmeg
1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt
100g chopped macademia nuts

100g chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 180°C. Line two 25cm loaf pans with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, beat eggs with a whisk. Add oil and sugar, then zucchini and vanilla. Combine flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking powder and salt, as well as macademias and chocolate chips. Add this to the egg mixture. Divide the batter into prepared pans. Bake the loaves for about 60 minutes or until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, with my cakes, it took about 50 minutes.

Chocolate glaze: Get the recipe here.

Cream Cheese Icing: With an electric mixer, combine 200g cream cheese (room temperature), 250g icing sugar and 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract. Or, instead of the vanilla extract, you could also use 1 tablespoon lemon juice and grated zest of one lemon. Mix until smooth and spread over your cake.