I was really looking forward to this recipe because I love each of those ingredients on their own, and I figured a cake with all three would be even better. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as well as I hoped. Don’t get me wrong, this cake tasted delicious, but the cooking time was so off.

So I made 2 loaves – an 8×4 and a 5×3 – and they took 75 and 45 minutes to cook, respectively. At first, I was thinking it might have been the fact that I cooked them in a toaster oven. But I bake in there all the time, so I ruled that out as an explanation. Much later, I realised it might be that there was too much moisture in the batter which is why it was taking so long to cook. The excess moisture must have come from the grated zucchini – I think it should have been well squeezed to remove all the water before adding to the batter. I knew it was weird that the recipe didn’t say to squeeze zucchini, but I carried on. If I make this recipe again, I will definitely try doing that to see if the cooking time is fixed. 

Also related to the skewed cooking time, my cake got a little burned on the top – I ended up covering it with tin foil for the last 20 minutes to prevent more colour. 

But like I said before, I really enjoyed the flavour of the cake. If the cooking time was normal, this cake would have been amazing. It’s not overly sweet and I was able to taste the pumpkin, which I liked. Also, this cake was decently easy to prepare – no super crazy ingredients/techniques – so that was nice.

Final thoughts: I would try to make this again, but with squeezing water from zucchini and maybe making in 8×8 or 9×9 for quicker cooking