Courgette and lemon layer cake.

Squash season is well and truly upon us, confirmed by a visit to the new World Food Garden at RHS Wisley last week.

My, what large gourds you have.

I can't claim to have grown anything of such enviable proportions, but I have found myself with a surfeit of courgettes in the last few weeks. Rummaging through t'internet for anything-but-spiralised, I came across this recipe for a loaf cake.

I have mixed feelings about vegetable cakes which can be summarised thus: carrot = yum; beetroot = stop trying to make it happen. It's not going to happen. But it's Week 5 of the summer holidays and I haven't got anything better to do.

I needed to use up more courgette than the recipe called for and so decided to double the quantities and make a classic layer cake. Other adaptations were necessitated by the limitations of my pantry and/or wanting to use up bits of ingredients.

It turned out very well and I will certainly try something similar again, perhaps with butternut squash or parsnip. It has a good, damp crumb with reasonable structural stability for slicing, and it kept well for three or four days in a cake tin. It must to be said that it was enormous. I distributed as much as possible to friends and family, as it may be made of courgette, but it is absolutely not a health food.

Ingredients

For the cake:

250 ml of extra virgin rapeseed oil

6 large eggs

250g of light brown soft sugar.

500g of grated courgette, including skins.

100g of almond flour

350g of plain flour

1 and a half tsp bicarbonate of soda

1tsp cream of tartar

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp ground clove

1 tsp salt

20g of chopped walnuts

A handful of demerara sugar

For the filling:

250g of mascarpone

100g of lemon curd

Icing sugar to serve

Method

Preheat the oven to 170 degrees fan, and grease two eight inch cake tins (line with baking paper if needed for your tins).

Beat the oil, eggs and soft brown sugar together in a large bowl until frothy. Stir in the courgettes and walnuts.

Add the two flours, bicarb, cream of tartar, salt and spices to the oil and egg mixture and stir until just combined.

Divide the mixture evenly between the tins - I weighed them to make sure. Sprinkle the top of each cake with demerara sugar.

Bake for around fifty minutes until risen, dark gold and a skewer comes out clean.

Place the cakes on wire racks and leave to cool.

For the filling, beat the mascarpone and lemon curd together until smooth. You can add a pinch of salt if desired. Invert one of the cakes to get a flat top, and sandwich them together with the lemon cream. Dredge the top of the cake with icing sugar just before serving.

Notes on ingredients and alternatives

You could use any neutral vegetable oil instead of rapeseed. Olive oil could also work, but will come through in the flavour. I wanted to use up some almond flour, but you could substitute the mixture with 450g of plain flour. The original recipe suggested 50g of walnuts (doubled to 100g) but I only had 20g. It was good for the texture and I would try again with more walnuts, but it would be fine if you didn't use any. Lemon zest in the cake would work well and you could play with the spices: for example having lots more ginger and less or no cinnamon. I added the demerara sugar on a whim and I don't think it made any difference - I wouldn't bother next time. The cake is quite damp and the icing sugar will dissolve into it after a while. Simply sprinkle on more if serving over a few days. You could also double the mascarpone/lemon cream mixture and use half to fill and half to top the cake. Lime curd could substitute well for lemon, and lemon or lime zest would look pretty on the top.