Chocolate Zucchini Cake, Live and Unrehearsed

Still in the throes of zucchini season, when Brandon Ellrich of Humor & Hummus agreed to join me on Talking Dirt, I knew right away that I wanted to bake something with zucchini in it. Having grown up on a farm, Brandon was game and we met Wednesday morning live and unrehearsed to bake our chocolate-zucchini cakes in our respective kitchens.

Here is the Chocolate-Zucchini Cake recipe we used, though I opted to skip the brown sugar and instead used the equivalent in white sugar plus a splash of molasses to my wet mix to add that brown sugar flavor. I also forgot to add the chocolate chips, but it’s a forgiving recipe and you know that chocolate cake is going to get eaten with or without those extra chocolate bits, lol.

The conversation wandered the way these live sessions do. I asked Brandon how he got into baking, and he told me about his mother's decades of baking wedding cakes for anyone in town who asked. I rambled about my ongoing, so-far-unsuccessful attempt to establish rhubarb here, and about why Runamuk moved away from chickens and, this spring, the sheep. And I told him about the year I was lunch lady at the local elementary school—always slipping vegetables and fruit into things where kids wouldn't expect them, until by the end of the school year they were more ready and willing to try Farmer Sam's “weird foods”.

The thread that mattered most, though, was about the format itself. I made the case that most people aren't reading anymore—they're scrolling, and if you want to reach them, you have to be willing to meet them where they are. Brandon added that: video doesn't replace the writing. He said, it makes the writing more personal, because by the time someone reads your next essay, they've already spent half an hour watching two people bake in real kitchens, dealing with real ingredients and real problems, and being exactly who they are.

That’s the whole pitch for these sessions, honestly. To show you we’re not robots. We’re just every day people doing the best we can with what’s in the cupboard.

Thank you The Famazing Mack Devlin🌛, LeftieProf, The Rebel Crone (Shālah), Sacred Storylines 🎨, Ms.Yuse, and many others for tuning into my live video with Brandon Ellrich! Join me for my next live video in the app.