Why You Should Consider Adding Zucchini To Your Cakes

Unlike cooking a pot of stew, baking a cake has a lot less margin for error. Any deviation from temperature, ingredient proportions, or freshness could be disastrous. So you should welcome any baking hacks that'll secure a successful cake flavor and texture, especially if its backed by an expert. Zucchini is the ingredient hack that expert baker, author, and recipe developer Jerrelle Guy recommends adding to your cake recipes for a moist, tender texture.

If adding an otherwise savory vegetable to a dessert recipe raises your eyebrows, Guy makes a convincing and reassuring argument for giving it a try: "Zucchini is mild in flavor and contains tons of water, so when you shred it and fold it into a cake batter, as it bakes, that excess water will seep into the cake and make your cake extra moist without affecting the overall flavor."

Stirring a shredded zucchini into your cake batter will evenly distribute its moisture while also bolstering its texture with thin wisps that melt seamlessly into the crumb as it bakes. You don't have to squeeze any water out of the zucchini before adding it to your cakes — Guy explains, "The little additional water will also weaken some of the gluten formation in the flour, creating a more tender crumb."

As a moisture tool, zucchini works best on cakes with lighter, fluffier crumbs. Denser cakes with a higher fat-to-flour ratio might not benefit from the water that zucchini emits. As an example, Guy says, "Adding watery zucchini to a traditional pound cake would produce larger steam holes, and create a texture closer to a muffin or quickbread." So instead of adding zucchini to this lemon-glazed pound cake recipe, try adding it to this easy three-ingredient lemon cake.

While zucchini provides a moist crumb to a fluffy cake recipe, added moisture will shorten a cake's shelf life. "Cakes with zucchini in it need to be refrigerated," explains Guy. If you're making a cake for a crowd, you'll probably consume any leftovers over the next day, but "if you need your cake to live on the counter for a week, maybe opt out of adding zucchini."

If you're worried about clashing flavors, zucchini's neutral and versatile profile certainly won't upstage robust dessert flavors like chocolate. We even have a recipe for chocolate zucchini cake as proof! At the other end of the spectrum, you can use zucchini's subtle savory earthiness to your advantage by pairing it with complementary flavors. It'll upgrade the taste of spicy cinnamon, tangy citrus, and nuts, for example. So while zucchini won't upstage a chocolate cake, it'll help bring out the taste of the walnuts or almond extract that your chocolate cake recipe might call for.