Grated Zucchini Is The Ingredient Hack For Ultra-Moist Cake

If you have a vegetable garden or live near a neighbor who does, you already know that summer's end brings the inevitable baskets filled with zucchinis. Calling this plant prolific is like calling kudzu assertive: For one thing, they flower like crazy — and there will be a fruit for every flower. If you pick the zucchini when they're a respectable size (and not the leg-sized monsters they'll eventually become), the mother plant gets the message and cranks out even more. So, what is one to do with this overabundance of summer squash? Well, there are at least 23 unexpected ways to cook with zucchini, for starters. But our chief advice is to get baking: Finely-grated zucchini is the absolute secret to the moistest cakes, brownies, and muffins. You don't even have to call it "zucchini cake" if you don't want to; you could just take credit for being a baking genius.

This is because zucchini has a very high water content. No, not just a very high water content; zucchini is basically water with a green peel — each one is 94% water, in fact. In addition, zucchini is not aggressively-flavored like its other gourd relative the pumpkin or even milder summer squash cousins. If zucchini can be said to have a flavor, it would be "vaguely sweet," or "whatever else its being baked with." This is why putting peeled and grated zucchini in your cake batter will inevitably lead to a masterpiece that will stay moist for days.

There are many well-known strategies for producing moist cakes, at least once you get past the "don't over mix the batter and store the cake properly" admonitions. These tend to involve the addition of milk, buttermilk, yogurt, or some other combination of liquid and fat. Fat will definitely make a cake moist but also increase its density. The other solutions are dairy-based with a definite flavor profile. Other cake-moistening additions like mashed bananas or applesauce are also (delicious) but assertively-flavored. You can also add icing, layer the cake with wet ingredients like custard or whipped cream, or brush the exterior with simple syrup or a boozy liqueur ... or you can just grate up a bowl of dairy-free, gluten-free, almost-flavor-free, nutritious zucchini.

Did we say nutritious? Oh yes, we did. Raw zucchini has an absolute ton of vitamin A, which will reduce a little when cooked — a process that will also increase its vitamin C content, so consider it a win-win. Beyond that, zucchini will bring additional nutrients, fiber, and antioxidants to the table, making it an ideal moistening ingredient.

So, your neighbor deposited a metric ton of zucchini on your doorstep. What to bake? In addition to the aforementioned cake, how about an absolutely luscious batch of brownies? (It's a much better, moistening addition to your recipe than, say, increasing the butter content — which will taste amazing but make the brownies extra dense and liable to brown unevenly.)

Beyond that, consider starting with easy classic zucchini bread, then move on to making sweet muffins and chocolate chip cookies, which feature your new best friend zucchini — in fact, any bake that you would like more airy and cake-like. In lieu of grating (which will produce a puddle of water anyway), you can just straight-up purée the zucchini with the eggs and other wet ingredients and it will simply disappear with respect to both flavor and texture. So, even if it sounds weird, start baking with this little watery courgette. It'll be a guaranteed moist cake level-up and one more thing to look forward to each summer.