Zucchini Cream Cheese Pound Cake

A light yet rich zucchini cream cheese pound cake with fluffy cream cheese frosting. (Jump to Recipe)  

I’m very excited to report that after years of trying, and failing, I have conquered one of my culinary nemeses: soggy shredded zucchini.  Amid all the great problems of our day, I know this was something you were very concerned about.

Hear me out.  Zucchini is one of those plants that everyone tries to hide in food, although I’m not really sure why.  I’m personally of the opinion that zucchini is excellent on its own, whether in grilled, roasted, or fried form, or turned into crispy baked fries.  We’ve done our fair share of all of that this summer.  But the thing is, zucchini is not a summer star like tomatoes or corn or peaches or cherries.  It doesn’t have the bright and bursting acidity of a ripe heirloom tomato or the sweet-tart juiciness of a freshly picked peach.  Zucchini is just…zucchini.  It’s very plant-like.  And because of that, there comes a time right around mid-August that I like to call “zucchini fatigue”.  That time when you’ve made zucchini in every friggin’ way possible, and there’s just no more you can do to make it appetizing for the 12th day in a row.  This is when I start to understand why people take to hiding it in cakes and muffins and brownies – there’s just no other way to get people to eat the stuff.

Please don’t misunderstand me – there is nothing wrong with adding some nutrients to chocolate cake or brownies.  We could definitely use it, or at least I could.  The problem for me has arrived when I attempt to add my dutifully shredded zucchini into the batter of an otherwise lovely cake.  Without fail, for the past 3-4 summers, every dang zucchini bread/cake/muffin I’ve made has turned out horribly heavy and soggy.  Every time, I’ve gone into it with such optimism.  Every time, the finished product has gone in the trash.  Brian told me just the other day that he would never forget the defeated *thwap* sound the last zucchini bread made when it landed at the bottom of the trash can.

This could not stand.  I’d wasted hours of time and plenty of perfectly good cake batter over the years on these scraps of shredded vegetable matter, and I was bound and determined to finally get the best of them.  So I did what every good lawyer does: I researched, got distracted, watched some Game of Thrones, researched, answered emails, pretended to work, researched, and postured to myself about why I hadn’t figured out the answer yet.  In the end, it was the Kitchn, as usual, that led me to the answer.  In the past, I’d always just shredded the zucchini in my food processor and thrown it straight into the batter, as recipes usually don’t specify anything beyond “shredded zucchini” in their instructions.  Turns out, zucchini is 95% water, and when you just shred it and throw it in your batter, that water has nowhere to go.  Ergo, soggy sadness.

So – I didn’t take any pictures of it because I was still skeptical about the outcome, but this time, once I shredded the zucchini (using the grating blade of my food processor), I let it sit in a mesh strainer over a bowl for a good 45 minutes while I preheated the oven and made the cake batter.  Lo and behold, a whole lot of greenish water pooled underneath the strainer in the bowl, more than I would have expected from a cup and a half of zucchini.  Then I pressed down on it with paper towels, and even more water came out.  Then I squeezed the strained zucchini between another double layer of paper towels, just to make certain they got good and dry.  Only then did I add that green confetti to the batter – and my oh my, what a difference it made.

A miracle, I tell you.  The cake was soft, rich, spiced, and fragrant, and NOT SOGGY AT ALL!  Look at those flecks of zucchini in there.  Curse = officially broken!

I did a happy dance around my living room, where I take all these photos by myself, usually wearing last night’s pajamas.  We live in a high-rise with floor to ceiling windows, so I’m pretty sure my neighbors have seen these antics and chalk it up to insanity.  They might be right.  But this time it was so appropriate!!

I brought this bad boy with us to visit my parents at their new condo in South Bend, and it’s safe to say it was well-received.  Having a vacation home in South Bend seems like an oxymoron, I know, but truth is stranger than fiction, and here we are.  Having zucchini cake on the patio on a July morning in Indiana.

What really makes this cake is not just the non-soggy zucchini, but the addition of cream cheese.  During our time of zucchini fatigue, it becomes necessary to dress up this plant with butter and sugar and spices to make it exciting again.  Adding cream cheese to both the batter and the frosting just takes it over the top, giving it a complexity that many overly sweet zucchini breads do not possess.  Cream cheese, in my mind, makes everything better.  See, e.g., these cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing.  Few things are not improved with the addition of cream cheese.  It’s just a fact.

You’ll definitely need a mixer for this one – preferably a stand mixer, but a hand mixer will do as well.  Most of my recipes can be done mixer-free, but this one isn’t one of them.  Whipping air into the batter and the frosting is essential for that fluffy texture and the beautiful swirls in the frosting.

 

And who doesn’t want swirls in their frosting?

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Zucchini fatigue, be gone!