I found myself recently with too much zucchini on my hands. Zucchini is one of those unassuming vegetables. There's not much to it by itself, but it makes a great ingredient in many different kinds of dishes. It readily absorbs flavors around it, and it has an appealing texture. Zucchini is great for low carbers, too, because an entire cup has only 4 grams of carbohydrates, one of which is fiber, for a net 3 grams. You get bonus nutrients in the form of vitamin A, potassium, and phosphorous, too.

For all these good reasons, you'll often find zucchini in my refrigerator. As happened this past week, it turned out to be too much. I know that this situation is common to people who actually grow zucchini, but I don't have that excuse. No, I bought some and thought I would use it up a little bit here, a little bit there as usual, but I didn't. Sometimes plans just go awry, and you're left with valuable produce on the brink of decay. Clearly, it was time to bake, but what?

Diana Lee has a terrific recipe for Chocolate Zucchini Loaf in her Baking Low Carb II: Bread and Breakfast book. It has peanut butter in it, which improves the texture as well as the flavor. I asked my husband if he'd like that, but he declared he'd like a spice bread better.

Zucchini bread, zucchini bread... a visit to the kitchen library was in order.
     

Dana Carpender's 500 Low Carb Recipes has a nice zucchini gingerbread that I've made several times before, but I wasn't in the mood for gingerbread. Instead, I picked up The Fannie Farmer Baking Book, which has been my baking bible for the past 20 years, and flipped to the index.

There were two entries for zucchini: the bread recipe I was looking for, which is nicely spicy with cinnamon and nutmeg, but something else that looked interesting: chocolate zucchini cake. There were a lot of ingredients, but it didn't look complicated, and it sounded delicious. Certainly worth a try!

So here we are. The original recipe called for nearly 3 cups of flour and 2 cups of sugar, along with a cup of chopped walnuts and a tablespoon of grated orange peel, but I've done away with all of them. Neither the walnuts nor the orange peel would up the carb count considerably, but they're really not necessary. This cake is quite nice enough without gilding the lily. We like it so much that I've renamed it Astonishing Chocolate Cake. It has a soft, moist crumb and is less dense than zucchini bread would be. This cake may well be the least painful way to get your kids to eat some vegetables.

I've used a combination of erithrytol and sugar free syrup to keep the carb count very low. If these are not available, you can substitute granular Splenda for some or all of the sweetener, cup-for-cup, but remember that granular Splenda has 24 grams of carbs per cup.