Last week while Tom and I were on vacation with my family, my father thoughtfully saved me the April 1 food section of the Los Angeles Times that he purchased while we were in Vegas (it is still hard for me to get used to the fact that the L.A. Times has now started publishing its food section on Thursdays instead of Wednesdays -- I always associate Wednesday as being food section day in all of the major newspapers). It looked like a particularly promising food section that day, with a cover story on macarons by Dorie Greenspan. I quickly flipped through the section looking for the Culinary S.O.S. column, which is always one of my favorites. I couldn't find it -- I was disappointed but figured that they just skipped the feature that week. But then lo and behold -- in the online version of the paper, I found a Culinary S.O.S. feature dated April 1 with a recipe for a zucchini tea cake. It looked like a great cake, but I was especially interested in the description of the cake as "remarkably low in fat."
I didn't have an orange on hand and so I used lemon zest instead. As I was mixing together the ingredients, I was trying to figure out how in the heck this cake could be low fat. While it only uses egg whites instead of whole eggs, each loaf includes a half a cup of oil and 3/4 cup walnuts. You sprinkle granulated sugar over the loaf before baking, and the loaf baked up with a crisp, flaky, sweet top. Although the recipe gave a very broad range of baking times (from 60 to 90 minutes), my loaf was done in 60 minutes.
The loaf was very moist and had a wonderfully chewy, sweet crust. The lemon flavor added some brightness, but I think it would have been better with the milder flavor of orange zest instead.
As far as being low fat, this bread is anything but. The LA Times provides nutritional information for all of the recipes it prints, and if you cut this loaf into ten slices, each slice has 264 calories and 17 grams fat (okay, at least the bread is low in saturated fat and has no cholesterol). To be honest, usually I just ignore the nutritional info at the end of each recipe, but if the newspaper considers this low fat, I think it would be better for me to just remain ignorant of the nutritional profile of their other recipes!
Recipe: Zucchini Tea Cake from Huckleberry Cafe, printed in the April 1, 2010 Los Angeles Times.
I didn't have an orange on hand and so I used lemon zest instead. As I was mixing together the ingredients, I was trying to figure out how in the heck this cake could be low fat. While it only uses egg whites instead of whole eggs, each loaf includes a half a cup of oil and 3/4 cup walnuts. You sprinkle granulated sugar over the loaf before baking, and the loaf baked up with a crisp, flaky, sweet top. Although the recipe gave a very broad range of baking times (from 60 to 90 minutes), my loaf was done in 60 minutes.
The loaf was very moist and had a wonderfully chewy, sweet crust. The lemon flavor added some brightness, but I think it would have been better with the milder flavor of orange zest instead.
As far as being low fat, this bread is anything but. The LA Times provides nutritional information for all of the recipes it prints, and if you cut this loaf into ten slices, each slice has 264 calories and 17 grams fat (okay, at least the bread is low in saturated fat and has no cholesterol). To be honest, usually I just ignore the nutritional info at the end of each recipe, but if the newspaper considers this low fat, I think it would be better for me to just remain ignorant of the nutritional profile of their other recipes!Recipe: Zucchini Tea Cake from Huckleberry Cafe, printed in the April 1, 2010 Los Angeles Times.
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