We’ve shared a lot of zucchini recipes on At Home over the years, including a show all about dinner recipes. But today’s show is focused on the sweet treats; it’s a zucchini dessert special from 2003!
Enjoy watching Arlene make a zucchini custard pie, a chocolate zucchini spice cake, and a classic zucchini bread. Yummy!
Chocolate Zucchini Cake
Ingredients
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 Tbsp vanilla
- 2 cups grated zucchini
- 1 can crushed pineapple, drained, reserve juice (20 oz)
- 3 cups flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 3 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1 tsp nutmeg
- 1 tsp ground cloves
- 4 Tbsp cocoa
- 1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
- 1 cup raisins
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9 x 13 inch baking dish.
- In a mixing bowl, using a mixer, combine eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla. Add zucchini and pineapple.
- In another bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and cocoa. Add to zucchini mixture and mix till smooth. With a spoon gently stir nuts and raisins into batter. Pour into prepared baking dish and bake in preheated oven for 35-40 minutes. Cool on wire rack. Makes 12-16 servings. Enjoy!
- Note: This cake may be frosted with Cream Cheese Frosting or one of your favorites.
Cream Cheese Frosting
Ingredients
- 1 pkg cream cheese, softened
- 1/4 cup butter, softened
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 Tbsp reserved pineapple juice
- 3 cups powdered sugar
Instructions
- In a mixing bowl, with a mixer, cream together cream cheese and butter until creamy. Add vanilla and pineapple juice.
- Add powdered sugar and mix until spreading consistency. Adjust powdered sugar until the right consistency. Ice cooled cake and refrigerate until ready to serve. Enjoy!
Zucchini Custard Pie
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups cooked zucchini (not too soft)
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 2 Tbsp cornstarch
- 2 large eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 1 can evaporated milk (large can)
- pinch of salt
- 1 unbaked 9 inch pie shell
- nutmeg
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
- In a blender, combine zucchini, sugar, cornstarch, eggs, vanilla, milk and salt. Blend until smooth. Pour into prepared pie shell. Sprinkle nutmeg on top.
- Bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes; then turn oven to 350 degrees and continue baking for 20 minutes. Makes 6-8 servings. Enjoy!
Zucchini Bread
This is an extremely good zucchini bread recipe that we use each year when our garden begins to produce zucchini. We normally make at least 20 loaves and freeze them. They are great at holiday times.
Ingredients
- 3 cup sifted flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup oil
- 2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup sour cream
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 cups shredded zucchini
- 1 cup walnuts
- 1 cup raisins
Instructions
- Prepare two bread loaf pans by greasing and flouring them well. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Sift together flour, baking soda, salt cinnamon, and baking powder. In a separate bowl combine eggs, oil and sugar. Add dry ingredients slowly to eggs. After these are thoroughly mixed, add sour cream and vanilla. Finally, stir in shredded zucchini, walnuts and raisins.
- Pour mixture into prepared loaf pans. Bake in preheated oven for about 1 hour and 20 minutes. When toothpick inserted comes out clean, loaves are done. Makes 2 loaves. Enjoy!
Transcript
- Well, hello and welcome to “At Home.” Today, we’re so glad that you could drop by. It’s always good when the family gets together. We are continuing in our series of harvest month, which is this month all month long, that we’re bringing to you some ideas what to do with all the bounty that’s coming in from your gardens, like the tomatoes, the cabbage, the zucchini, apples. All kinds of stuff coming through, and you think, what am I gonna do with these zucchinis. Well, I hope you’re keeping them and harvesting them when they’re about this size. This is when they’re the tastiest, when they’re the best. If you let them get to be real big, like they look like torpedoes, they just don’t have a good flavor. That’s not the time. And I know you keep thinking, well, I can’t use them right now, so I’ll just leave them keep growing. But then they lose. Better to take them off the vine and give them to somebody. And the best way to know is if your friends have had too many is when they see you coming with the zucchini and they go the other way. Don’t give it to that guy ’cause they’ve said I’ve had enough up to here, seriously. No, they’re good from the garden now. They’re good just to steam, to cook in a skillet with some onions and stuff. It’s great. And now’s the time to do it. I have to show you this wonderful little gift that came to our “At Home” offices here at CTV from a wonderful lady named Melanie Tappe, T-A-P-P-E, Tappe. And she has Tapestry Gifts & Treasures. And she sent this to me, made this for me, made one for Linda too, who is our associate producer. And she does all kinds of things with wedding invitations. And I think this is just so neat because I have to read this. It says, has my name and this lady prays before she makes something like this. Lord, what scriptures would you have me to put on to personalize it? And at the top it says, fear not for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name and you are mine. That’s the Lord speaking from Isaiah. Has my name and then translation of it, or the meaning, says, pledge of God, truthful one. And then the scripture that God gave her for me was blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished. That’s from Luke 1:45 You know what? These little gifts like this are just so precious. And that has such meaning. And I wanna thank you so much Melanie. We’re gonna put her, I think it’s on the screen now, her web address. If you’re interested in something like this, she has a business and she’s a real blessing. And maybe you’d be interested in looking into it. Thank you from the bottom of our heart, Melanie. We really appreciate it. And this will have a treasured place in my office. You can be sure. Well, stay with us. Right after the hint, we’re coming back to start our program, “What to Do With a Zucchini.” We’ll be right back. Here’s today’s “At Home” hint. When grating zucchini for recipes do not remove the stem. It makes a perfect handle and will make it much easier to grate. If you’ve got a helpful hint, we’d like to hear from you. Send your hint to: At Home Hints, Cornerstone Television, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Well, to begin with, the first one we’re going to do is our zucchini cake. And I’ve chosen recipes today that you can do now, wrap them well and put them in your freezer. Bring them out during the holidays, or when a friend drops in, or if you just need to take a little something to a neighbor, someone that’s shut in or whatever. This would be the time do things that are coming out of the garden like your zucchini. So we’re gonna do a cake that would be great to freeze. First of all, we’re gonna take some sugar. Put in our mixing bowl. And some oil. This would be one cup of vegetable, not olive oil. Olive oil would be way too heavy and it would not be good in this recipe. And we’re just going to let that start to mix. The oil takes the place of the fat in a recipe. Usually you use butter or Crisco or something like that. The oil is what we’re using in this. The oil will keep it more moist, I believe. Then I’m gonna add a little bit of vanilla. And as that creams together, just add three eggs, whole eggs. And we’re going to let that continue. Now while that’s creaming a little bit, our dry ingredients, they are flour, three cups of flour. We have some baking soda, baking powder, ground cinnamon, ground cloves, ground nutmeg, sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. You know what, I’m just seeing now I’m not getting all that flavor out of there. There we go, all right. And last, but not least, four tablespoons of cocoa powder. That’s like the Hershey Cocoa, you know you make hot chocolate or fudge or whatever? So you wanna mix those together and I’m just gonna take a fork and blend them well. You say zucchini and chocolate? Yep. As a chocolate cake, it’s wonderful. I’m making a 13 by 9 pan. Now, before we add the ingredients, the dry ingredients, we’re gonna take one can of crushed pineapple. It’s a 20 ounce can. We’re gonna drain it well. We’re gonna add that right in. Like so. And this is two cups of grated zucchini. Need some room to put that in and you want a nice thin grate on that. You don’t want it to be big chunks. If you have a food processor, that would be the perfect thing to use that blade at the top that shreds. That’s what you’d wanna use. So we’re just going to let that mix about a little bit. You know what, if you go to the trouble of measuring out for one, why not measure out for two and bake them both and put them in the freezer. Wrap them well. It just makes so much sense. If you’re going to the trouble of doing it once, do it twice, and you save yourself some time and trouble. Now we’re gonna add our dry ingredients. I’m just going to add them all at once because that will finish our batter. It sounds like a lot of ingredients, I know, ’cause you know we only used three or four or five, but the result of this is so good that you’re gonna enjoy and be glad that you took the time. ‘Cause basically, it’s just assembling everything and then putting it together. Process is not hard. How nice that batter is, it’s wonderful. I like to kind of give it one quick powerful beating like that. Now we’re gonna clean this off. Take the blade out. Clean it off as well as we can. You see that zucchini’ll stick around that blade, but you wanna. I’m telling you, it looks good even already. ‘Cause anything has chocolate in it, how could it not be good, right? That’s one of those yummy, yummies. Now what we’ll do. Okay, did they they booby trap? Oh here we go. Sometimes they booby trap stuff, you know? I never know till I get to that point. Now we’re gonna add a cup of pecans or walnuts. Just drop those in. We don’t wanna put them in with the mixer ’cause that beats it too hard. And a cup of raisins. And we’ll just fold those in with our spatula. I tell you, this is a hearty cake. Oh boy. What you’d want to do with this is preheat the oven, have a greased and floured 13 by 9. I was thinking today we could probably even do this in a Bundt pan. You would just have to adjust the timing of how long it bakes, and you’d have to keep testing it. But I think it’d be pretty as a Bundt cake. So this gives you a lot of batter and we’re gonna pour that right into our prepared baking dish. Ah, now you’re gonna preheat the oven to 325 degrees. That’s a little lower. Normally we bake everything at 350, but there is a reason. Something like this that has a lot, it’s a heavier. In the lighter cakes you need the air to lift it. This is a denser batter, so you won’t need the higher heat to do it. It almost needs a slower heat so that it cooks longer for it to lift. I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but I know what I’m trying to say. Can you get it, Mike?
- [Mike] Oh I got it.
- Did you get it?
- [Mike] Yeah.
- Okay. Could you explain to me what I just said? But anyway, all right.
- [Mike] You wanna take that much time?
- Well, I’m sorry the show’s over. Mike’s still trying to tell me what I said, which he doesn’t have a clue, neither do I. All right into the oven. And we’re going to bake this for 35 to 40. Right here. Okay, here we go, Nick. Look good?
- [Nick] Yeah, it does.
- Yeah. All right, so the cake’s in the oven. Now you could also put a really nice cream cheese icing on that if you want to when you serve it. Now, the next one we’re going to do is a pie. And this one, you have to have a 13, I’m sorry, a nine inch, be a really big pie. A nine inch crust unbaked. I kind of like to use the metal pan and we have our ingredients ready. We’re gonna take a break. When we come back, I’m gonna show you the filling. We’ll be right back. Well, we’ve just lined our pan, our nine inch pie pan, with a pie crust that’s going to hold our zucchini pie. And the filling for this goes into a blender. You take one and a half cups of cooked zucchini. And all I did was just cut it into small pieces, add a little water to it, put it on until it was fork tender. You don’t want it mushy. You just want it soft. Drain the water off, and then add that to the blender. All right. Now to that, we’re going to add 3/4 cup of sugar. I love this ’cause everything goes in the blender at one time and two tablespoons of corn starch to thicken. We know that that helps to thicken anytime we use that, or flour. Two large eggs, which I have right here. And two teaspoons of vanilla. This is so simple, I’m telling you. One large can of evaporated milk. Like so. And a pinch of salt. And that’s it. And all we’re gonna do is put this on. Until it pulverizes. We wanna stop because I can see that there’s something there that hasn’t gotten mixed in with it. So you wanna take something, go down the edge, just make sure that everything is being blended well. You don’t want some things to come out in a lump when it’s supposed to be nice and creamy and smooth. So we’re gonna give it another pulse. There we go. And now, can you believe how simple this is? I’m telling you. All we do now is take this and pour it right into our pie shell. Isn’t it beautiful green? Love it. Just to the top. Isn’t it nice how it fills it all? And then on top of that, we’re gonna sprinkle some nutmeg.
- [Man] Oh!
- [Arlene] Yeah! It’s gonna be good, isn’t it?
- [Man] Oh yeah.
- Oh yeah, I think so too. Excuse me, we’re having a conversation. Don’t mind us. We’re just talking. Yeah, I figured that one day I’m gonna walk in here and it’s not going to be “At Home with Arlene Williams.” It’s gonna be “At Home With the Crew” and I’ll be around the camera. That’s gonna be a treat.
- [Man] That’ll be fun.
- Me running a camera will really be a treat. I’m gonna open my oven because you can see that that pie shell is very full and we don’t want any accidents. So open your oven. You could also bring your pie shell over, put it on the shelf and then pour your filling in, if you feel like you can’t make it over there without spilling. Now, that’s gonna bake at 425 for 10 minutes. I’m gonna set my timer. And then at 10 minutes, you’re gonna reduce your temperature on your oven to 350. Let me make sure. 10 minutes, that’s right. And then it bakes for 20 minutes more. Total baking time would be about 30 minutes. Well, let’s see, we got the cake in the oven. We got the pie in the oven. What else should we make? How about bread? Zucchini bread, next to banana bread, is probably my favorite. And it’s so versatile, so easy to do, and so delicious. And I have learned to make it this time of the year in all different size pans. Now this recipe I’m gonna give you today makes two regular size, which would be this bread pan size, but you can make them. I just brought a few different sizes here. These are the ones I use from home. And these foil you can reuse over and over and over. They never, well, they do get shabby after a while, but you can use them. Let’s start to make it. Now, I’m gonna move some of my stuff over here. Three cups of flour and one teaspoon of baking soda. These are the dry ingredients for the bread. Baking soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon. Get rid of those. And again, we’ll just blend those up with a fork. Like so. Basically you start out the cake or the breads with the same ingredients. You have a butter or lard or an oil of some kind and you mix a sugar with it. That’s the basis for these. Here we have the oil again. And again I think that’s because it keeps it moist. And just wanna make sure I have it all together. And then we do the sugar, which is two cups of sugar ’cause this makes a lot. And some eggs. Now you want to be sure that you use a large egg, not an extra large. We don’t want the extra large. Gets too much moisture in there. Like so, and again, we’re gonna use a mixer. I’m glad we have so many mixers on this set. Keeps the show moving, right Mike? We blend the oil and the sugar again. Add the eggs. Like so. Now we’re gonna add this very slowly to the mixture. And I’m gonna this with one hand, so it’ll be interesting. Little bit at a time. Gonna make a beautiful two loaves of bread, which is nice, because you go to the trouble you wanna get the maximum out of what you’re doing. Two loaves is great. I’m gonna stop this for a minute here ’cause I don’t want anything going on the floor. And I know my limitations. All right, now we do it. Here we go. Once this is mixed very well, we’re gonna add some sour cream and vanilla, which should lighten up the batter. Right now, it’s very thick. You can see that. Quite thick. There we go. Now we’re gonna add some sour cream and some vanilla. Here’s our vanilla. Here’s the sour cream. And again, that will lighten it up beautifully. Give it another beat just to make sure that incorporates in the batter really well. There we go. Now, we do our zucchini. Right in like that. And you know what? I’m going to add some raisins and some nuts, whole nuts in this one. Somebody told me that the whole nuts if you put that in keeps the batter moister, doesn’t dry out so quickly. It might be something to think about. And I’m just going to stir this. When I get it completely stirred, we’re gonna put it into our prepared pans, put it in the oven. This bakes at 350 for an hour and 20 minutes. Long time, but check it after an hour and then just go every 10 minutes after that. Well, we’ll be right back after the hint. Stay tuned, we’ll see you in just a minute. Don’t forget now, you can either send through the regular mail for your “At Home Newsletter,” or you can go to their internet, go to www.ctvn.org and click the buttons for “At Home.” And it will walk you through the subscription process. That’s only $15 for an entire year of the “At Home Enjoy Newsletter,” and it’s very convenient because you don’t have to send any kind of self-addressed stamped envelopes or anything. It’s there every first of the month for you to enjoy. You can print it out, keep your collection. It’s great. It’s an easy way to do it, and hopefully, we’ve come into the new electronic age with this. And we hope that you’re gonna be able to enjoy that. If not, send your self-addressed stamped business-sized envelope. Either way you get the whole month’s worth of recipes this harvest month, when we’re showing you what to do with all the bountiful things coming in from your garden. Well, today it was zucchini and we have finished three dishes that really you could make them and put them in your freezer. You wanna be sure that you wrap well and airtight. If you’re making the breads, don’t put foil against the bread. You wanna use a plastic wrap first, and then the foil, make sure they seal tight and then mark on the outside what it is and when you made it and put it in your freezer in the coldest part, probably in the bottom. If you have a chest freezer or an upright, that’s better than the one on top of your refrigerator. Here we are with our wonderful zucchini bread and look how beautifully moist that looks and it tastes wonderful. Those raisins and the walnuts, just delicious. Makes two nice sized loaves. Remember you can make smaller loaves too. And then our cake. We did put a cream cheese icing on this. You can see this makes a big, beautiful cake. Still a little bit too warm to cut. I really wanted to cut it for you, but it’s still too warm. So you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you that is a delicious, moist cake and it stays moist. You say, what can I do with this? Cut it in half and freeze half of it. And then our zucchini pie. Beautiful with nutmeg. Zucchini three different ways. You have your bread, you have your cake and you have your pie. Hope you’ll try them ’cause I think you’re gonna enjoy them. And remember the bounty that’s coming now, make some stuff and put in the freezer. So be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you here “At Home.” We’ll see you then.
- [Announcer] Food provided by McGinnis Sisters Special Food Stores in Brentwood and Monroeville. Taste the world.
- [Announcer] Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible. Okay.
- On the next “At Home,” we’re doing harvest. Harvested vegetables, fruits for this whole month. We’ve already done our tomatoes. Now we’re doing apples, cabbage, zucchini, all on “At Home” for the month of September. Join us, won’t you?
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