COURGETTE CAKE AND FLOWER ARRANGING / EMMA'S ALLOTMENT DIARIES

Good morning everyone, welcome back to my allotment diaries. My name is Emma. These are my allotment diaries but I'm not in my allotment today, I'm in my kitchen at home because it is just too hot to get down to the allotment plot today. So I thought I would do a little at home vlog today, show you my garden process, progress even. I've got some new plants to grow out in the garden which I bought yesterday. I want to show you how everything's getting on and I also want to show you first a recipe that I'm going to make with a courgette that I picked from my plot. If you have sown courgette plants like I have this year for the first time I've got three plants and I am just getting courgette after courgette and it is just insane. I mean it's amazing and it's great but it is also a little bit intimidating because I don't know what to do with them all. So a lot of you got in touch with me and gave me some recipe ideas. One thing that I have done which I will show you is I have sliced up a couple of courgettes and I have frozen them. So I just sliced them into little circles here and I just stuck them in the freezer and I will add these to bolognese sauces, soups, stews, stir fries, anything like that and it just keeps them useful for longer so that was a really great idea. But something that everybody kind of or most people recommended was to make cakes of courgettes which is just a fantastic idea. I love cake. One of the cakes that I found online is a chocolate cake, even better, I love chocolate. So we're going to go into my back room now because there's no room in here to bake and I'll show you how I'm going to bake it. Right, welcome to my dining room. So here are all the ingredients that I am going to need to cook my courgette chocolate cake. I need 375 grams of self-raising flour. I need 375 grams of caster sugar. I need 175 milliliters of olive oil. I need my mammoth courgette which I didn't know what else to do with. Here it is. I need three eggs. I need 50 grams of cocoa powder and a little bit of vanilla essence I will add right at the end. Right, I'm just going to show you how I'm going to prepare this courgette. So I've got a mammoth one here and what I'm going to do first is just grate it and my guinea pigs are starting to squeak immediately because they know the sound of a vegetable being grated. And then I'm going to feed this bit to my guinea pigs. Excuse me. Now what we're going to do is de-seed it. I saw you flinch when I picked up that knife. Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. So we're going to chop the ends off the courgette like so. We're going to go all the way down. So this is the easiest way I've found to de-seed. Actually you know what, there's not that many seeds in here. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just chopping it in half again just like so. And then what I'll do, you can see here we have some seeds, not many. I'm sure your courgettes have got more. We're just going to take out the seeds like so. Oh god. Right, there we go. We've got a nice plate full of freshly chopped courgette. I've used one large courgette. The recipe says two smaller ones but because I had that giant one I thought one would be enough. If your courgette is a little bit too wet and you can tell that because it just feels really sloppy and sticky, what you can do is put it under a tea towel like this and just squeeze the excess juice out and the tea towel will just absorb it because I don't want it to be completely dry because the joy of using a courgette in a cake recipe, so I've read, is that it keeps the cake really moist. So I don't want to take out all the moisture of the courgette but I don't want it to be too wet and slippery and sloppy. No one wants a sloppy cake. Right, so I've squeezed out some of the excess moisture and the towel feels quite wet so I know I've got rid of a lot of that. Right, let's get putting the cake together. Right, we're going to start with wet ingredients first so I'm going to whack in my olive oil, that goes, three eggs together and also my courgette which is a wet ingredient so in all my courgette. Oh, this is not coming off. In it goes, lovely. So we will start with the caster sugar. It feels like quite a lot of sugar in this recipe actually. I'm wondering if I needed quite so much but I thought I'd stick with the recipe this time. Don't go off course. And then I'm going to add the cocoa powder which is 50 grams. Oh, it smells so good already and all it is is eggs and cocoa powder. Who needs a cake, eh? Right, finally let's start tipping in our self-raising flour. This is 350 grams of self-raising flour. I think I said 375 earlier and I probably corrected it when I wrote over the top of what I was saying. Oh, it's looking very chocolatey. It is looking and smelling fantastic and I absolutely cannot stop myself having a taste. So good. It's probably a bit, it's going to be very messy. So good. It's not very neat or the best of times let alone this. Right, in we go. Obviously this is going to rise like absolute crazy so I've done it about two-thirds full. I've got quite a bit of mixture left. I'm wondering if I should just stuff it in some little cupcake moulds and just make a couple of little chocolate cupcakes. But anyway, here it is. We're going to whack it in the oven now. I have a fan oven and I'm putting it on 140 degrees celsius on a fan oven. It's going to be in the oven for about an hour. So it does take quite a long time, a bit like carrot cake actually, that takes a long time too. So let's whack it in. Right, so that cake's going to take about an hour. So while it is cooking in the oven, it's looking amazing by the way, I'm going to show you some of the garden and some of the changes that have happened because it's very exciting. I have the washing out here, sorry, it's so warm. It's just going to dry really quickly. In this planter here, this is something I really wanted to show you first. So the nasturtiums are in, oh there's my shadow, in full bloom at the moment. They're absolutely beautiful and I can just pick them and put them on salads and things, which is amazing. And then I've got some rosemary here. My strawberry plant has a little strawberry on it, which is so cute. And these are some herbs here which I got from the supermarket. So this is thyme and this is mint and I just bought them from the supermarket. They were quite cheap and then I just whacked them in as a little bit more. So this is sort of my mini herb garden as such and it's just right next to the kitchen. So I can just pick and cook. There's the piggies, they have to have this over because it gets really, really sunny there. Here are my runner beans doing really, really well. They've actually got to the top and I've had to like bend them round because they kept trying to go up the wall. But you can see we're starting to get lots and lots of beans, which is amazing. And again it's in my little mini kitchen garden out here. So I can just pick and go. The strawberries on the wall, on the windowsill here, these are finished now. I'm not getting any more strawberries but I am getting some new tomato shoot, strawberry shoot plants coming off. So that's really exciting and when they get a little bit bigger I will pop them on and try to grow them. So that's excellent. And then down here I have my tomato plants which are doing a lot better than the allotment ones. So you can see I've got quite a few tomatoes coming on this one and this one here. This is a bit skinny, this one. I'm not sure. It's a little bit of an anorexic tomato plant but there we go. At least I am getting some lovely tomatoes. And I'll show you the plants that I picked up from B&Q yesterday. So this one here is a lovely dahlia. It was £6. Look at the size of it. It's massive and it was only £6. It's absolutely gorgeous. It is a mystic spirit so it's got this darker foliage and lovely little yellow flowers which I love. And I also picked up an echinacea and I got a pink one. It's actually a mixed colour. I don't know if we'll get any colours other than mixed. Anytime I buy a plant that says it's got mixed coloured flowers I always end up with just one colour. So I reckon they're probably all going to be pink but if they are mixed that will be lovely too. On here I am growing some red cabbages for the allotment plot and on this side I have some more cauliflower and in here I've got some lettuce. You can see some of them coming up there which is very exciting. So hopefully I have some more lettuces to sow out soon, some plant out. This is how Tommy's teepee is looking right now. It's looking very full, very exciting. I keep getting more sweet peas because I keep picking them. These are my favourite sweet peas. I don't remember what they are. I really wish I did but they're really deep pink. They look red on camera but they're not. They're really deep like fuchsia colour and they're just gorgeous. I just love them but yeah as you can see it's really really fully grown. It's all shady in there which is just brilliant and these little daisies are coming out around it as well which is just looking lovely. My little cosmos plant here which I grew from a seed has really come into its own. I've actually got loads more over there but this one is the one that seems to be doing the best because I put it in the actual border so it must be getting more moisture here or something than the potted ones. They are just lovely. They're the double headed flowers so they're really like fluffy flowers. They've got like double petals which I was really interested in. I just think they're beautiful and I love how they just sort of float like that bumping into each other. I just love them. They're so pretty and then next to it is my brand new apple tree which I don't think we'll get many apples on it this year and actually in fact I think you should pull them off but I do have one. I do have one apple just here. My sunflowers are massive. This one over here is just over nine foot. I don't know how that's happened guys. It's just happened. It just grew that big. I really don't know but look it's just massive but obviously the flower head is pointing away from our garden because why would it want to face us? This one is. This one's a bit happier but this one is a little bit antisocial. But this area down here has just been amazing for just coming down, sitting in the shade, enjoying the sun and I've written a lot of my book down here as well which is just lovely and this is the view I have. Right there you go. There's a mini little update on my garden and I'm going to plant out those two plants later and pick some flowers but now let's check on the cake and see how the cake is doing. I used to be terrible for opening the oven before the cake is ready because when you open the oven obviously you release all the heat and so the cake can't rise properly but I used to be terrible for it and now I just like try to peer through. Oh wow okay it's really risen. Right while I was out in the garden I actually picked some of the flowers out there so I've got a great big batch of sweet peas and I'm probably just going to leave this in this little home pride pasta jar because they smell amazing and to be honest they don't really need arranging do they? Look at them they're an arrangement all on their own. So there we go and I also picked some of the pom-pom dahlias, I've got some double-headed cosmos, I've got some of the scabias in here, just a couple that were about to die so I thought I'd save them and prolong them a bit longer and I've got some of the daisies and I'm not sure what these are called they kind of look like echinacea but I know they're not so I'm not sure. I also picked some foliage so I've got some dahlia foliage here and some of it's been nibbled by snails and slugs but I can't do anything about that because that's just what they're like and I also picked some buddleia and just because I thought it would be nice to have some foliage in the arrangement too so I'm just going to take the bottom leaves off of the buddleia I'm probably just going to pick them off to be honest because I don't want any leaves to go into the water because then it contaminates the water quicker and makes the flowers die faster something I've learnt so I think that'd be about right. I'm tempted to stick all the foliage on the outside actually I think maybe that's not right. There's the other dahlia one. I know my vase is far too big for these flowers it's the only vase I have and I I just think you should just work with whatever you've got. I haven't got 40 pounds to spend on a fancy pantsy vase though I might buy a slightly smaller one. I'm just going to chop the top off of these buddleias they look a bit sad. Oh you're sticking up a little bit don't do that let's play about with it for like an hour or so but yeah I just think whack them in a vase you know like nature's done all the hard work for us but it's just it's just therapeutic and nice just to fiddle about with flowers for a bit and get them looking nice but I'm no expert. I think that looks beautiful to be honest and it's all homegrown and it's everything from my garden and I'm absolutely chuffed with it. Right the cake is ready. It's massive it's massive. I've brought it into here because it's probably getting a little bit dark in there the joys of living in a Victorian terrace and the back of the house gets dark first and the front of the house is dark at the beginning anyway. Here it is. It's massive I mean that's my hand I don't know what's wrong with me I seem to produce massive sunflowers and massive cakes but we're going to take it out and I'm going to try a little piece now before the kids have it all because I know they will. It definitely looks like a cake that was terrible cutting I'm so sorry it's my terrible cutting skills right honestly I can't I can't get anything right right I'm going to try some of this cake. I love it when it's still so warm it smells delicious. Tastes good. I can't taste the courgette at all. It's really good but I cannot taste courgette at all and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing but the cake is definitely very very moist like it's not at all dry even though I have absolutely cooked it to death and the the top is like like that the middle is really really delicious and moist so this is a great idea thank you so much for recommending that I make a courgette chocolate cake. I'm going to come up with some more courgette recipes I'm going to have to because I'm just getting so many at the moment at the plot and I will see you in my next vlog I hope you enjoyed this one it's a little bit different I'm just trying something different on days when I can't get to the plot because I want to continue to keep putting videos out so I hope you enjoyed it let me know what you thought of it let me know any more courgette ideas for recipes and I'll give them a go and I'll see you in my next vlog thanks for watching guys bye