Slack Lasagne: Saturday's made-up cake

While I was speaking to my mum the other day she mentioned that she had been to a museum café where they had on offer a courgette, ginger and lime cake. I thought that this sounded rather delicious so asked her if she had done anything useful like get a recipe (no), or try some (no). So I had the idea of this in my mind but nothing to go from. Surely the internet would help me out. No. Plenty of recipes for courgette and ginger or courgette and lime but not the three way combination. So I would have to use my imagination.

I have a rather excellent recipe for courgette, lemon, pine-nut and sultana cake, so I decided to work to a variation of this. We had one of my brother-in-law's courgettes left plus two little yellow ones from our garden. This amounted to 220g, the recipe called for 300g. So I decided to augment the courgette with some carrot. Two small carrots made up the short fall.

This was going to be a risky cake, especially as my friend Shelley who was due to visit for the weekend is renowned as a chocolate fiend. Fortunately her boyfriend George is renowned for eating almost anything – he, along with Matt (my husband) and another friend's fiancée formed what they refer to as the gluttony club after their performance with the canapés and puddings (I seem to remember the plum and cardamom mess being a particular favourite) at a wedding last year.

I grated the vegetables along with the contents of a jar of stem ginger in syrup (syrup drained for some other purpose in the future). The original recipe requires 225g of sultanas and the jar said that the drained weight of ginger was 190g and this seemed close enough. The food processor came into its own as I wouldn't have fancied my chances manually grating all the little balls of ginger.

I didn't change the composition of the basic cake ingredients: 150g butter, 175g sugar (although I did use a combination of soft brown and caster rather than all caster), 225g plain flour, 1tsp baking powder and 3 eggs. Once these were all combined in the usual manner a stirred through my grated veggies and ginger. It looked a little bit sludgy so I added a shake of poppy seeds, in the hope of giving it a bit of bite from mouthful to mouthful.

The lime was nearly forgotten, fortunately I remembered in the nick of time and grated all the zest of one into the mix. Sometimes recipes say to use the zest of half a citrus fruit but this always seems a bit wasteful, because what would you do with the other half. I would have liked to have added some lime juice as well but the mixture was already looking quite slopping so I didn't risk it.

I poured the mixture into a large-ish (20cm I think) round spring-form cake tin and put it into the oven at 180ºC. The baking time for the original cake is given as 40-45minutes and I had no reason to think that this would deviate. It started to go golden on the top and the skewer test indicated that it was indeed done after this time.

Next to the icing. As you know, I rarely bother with this, but we had guests and I had a load of lime juice to do something with. I was not going to do anything more advanced than a glacé icing though. I have learnt from previous mistakes and added the juice to a load of icing sugar rather than the other way round. This was a good job because I had a load of lime juice left even after I'd made plenty of icing to cover the cake.

Lunch was reheat pizza and risotto after which we were all rather full so I packed up 4 pieces of cake for us to take on our afternoon walk. We were taking Shelley and George for a walk along part of the Cornish coast path, which would also (much to George's excitement) feature two ferry trips. I was a bit worried about the cake because even though the skewer test had indicated that it was cooked it looked quite wet still when I cut into it. But it was too late to do anything about it now so we'd just have to hope for the best.

The first eaters didn't seem to think there was any problem with under-cooking, and Shelley didn't seem at all disappointed in the lack of chocolate. Seconds were had for pudding on Sunday lunchtime. This is the most made up cake that I've made yet and as such I'm really pleased with it. You can't taste the courgette and carrot – which is good given that they're supposed to add texture and moisture (they did) rather than flavour. The lime and ginger balanced well, you could taste them both but neither to the detriment of the other; from time to time you got a lovely chunk of ginger. Matt took some round to one of his friend's. Thirds and fourths were had by my mum and mother-in-law – more positive feedback. And now it's all gone (this cake probably has to be eaten very soon after baking because I think it would probably go mouldy otherwise – but I guess it might freeze ok).