Zucchini Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting - CopyKat Recipes (2024)

Zucchini Cake with cream cheese frosting is a heavenly dessert and a tasty way to eat your veggies! This old-fashioned cake has been a favorite for generations. You can make it as a layer cake, sheet cake, or bundt cake. This moist cake is deliciously flavored with cinnamon and black walnuts.

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This is the best zucchini cake recipe ever. This zucchini cake is moist and crumbly like zucchini bread, but richer with more egg and sugar and with the best kind of finish – a delicious cream cheese frosting.

Serve up your zucchini cake as a dessert, or enjoy a slice with your morning or afternoon coffee. It’s also a great cake to take along to summer potlucks!

Ingredients for a delicious homemade zucchini cake

This rich yummy cake is made with zucchini, eggs, flour, sugar, vegetable oil, cinnamon, and black walnuts. It’s made even more delicious with a frosting made with cream cheese, butter, sugar, and vanilla extract. The finishing touch is a garnish of toasted black walnuts.

Zucchini Cake Recipe Tips for the Cook

• Allow your ingredients to warm up to room temperature. Eggs taken out of the refrigerator can be brought to room temperature by placing them in a warm water bath for about 10 minutes.
• Black walnuts can be hard to find. You can substitute regular walnuts or pecans.
• For a gluten-free cake, change the flour to rice flour. Or, use gluten-free self-rising flour (and omit the baking powder and soda).
• You can reduce the sugar by substituting maple syrup in the cake and halving the sugar in the frosting.
• You can also opt for coconut oil instead of vegetable oil.
• If you prefer a single-layer zucchini sheet cake, use a 9 x 13-inch pan.
• If you want to bake your cake in a 10-inch tube or bundt pan, you will need to increase the bake time. It will take approximately 1 hour.

How to Prepare Zucchini for the Cake

Grating the zucchini for your cake ensures you will have moisture in every single bite. Use the larger side of a box cheese grater to shred your zucchini. Do not squeeze it or drain it to remove any of the moisture; you want it to make the cake moist!

• Although you don’t taste the zucchini, its addition is the secret to keeping this cake so incredibly moist!

Can This Recipe for Zucchini Cake Be Used to Make a Chocolate Zucchini Cake?

Yes. You can make a super moist and indulgent chocolate zucchini cake studded with chocolate chips and topped with chocolate fudge frosting. Click here for a recipe.

Here’s another link to a chocolate zucchini cake recipe with brown butter pistachio frosting. This frosting has just the right sweet-salty balance to partner with the deep chocolatey taste of the cake. Browning butter is a French cooking technique that can take a recipe from good to fabulous.

How to Store Your Zucchini Cake

This cake will be fine at room temperature for a few days, covered in a cake keeper or some plastic wrap. You can store your cake in the fridge, but you may find it dries out.

You can also store any leftover cake in the freezer, well wrapped, for up to 6 weeks.

What to Do With Too Much Zucchini

If you have so much zucchini that you simply don’t know what to do with it, click on this link to find out how to freeze it for future use.

You can also use your zucchini to make delicious zucchini chips and zucchini bread. And, here’s a link to a whole bunch of zucchini recipes so you’ll never run out of ideas.

This recipe for zucchini cake is a great way to use fresh zucchini and the best zucchini cake recipe ever! If you’re someone who believes veggies should have nothing to do with dessert, please keep an open mind. Carrot cake, anyone?!

Zucchini Cake Ingredients

Here’s a list of what you need for the cake:

• Sugar
• Vegetable oil
• Zucchini
• Eggs
• All-purpose flour
• Baking powder
• Baking soda
• Salt
• Ground cinnamon
• Black walnuts

Cream Cheese Frosting Ingredients

Just 4 simple ingredients needed for this creamy frosting:

• Butter
• Cream cheese
• Powdered sugar
• Vanilla extract

How to Make Zucchini Cake

1. Grease two 9-inch round cake pans.
2. Cream together sugar and oil in a large bowl.
3. Add grated zucchini and eggs and mix it all together well.
4. Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon. Mix to combine.
5. Pour the batter equally into the cake pans.
   
6. Bake at 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
7. Remove the cake from the pans and place them on wire racks. Cool completely before frosting.

How to Make Cream Cheese Frosting

1. Allow butter and cream cheese to soften at room temperature.
2. Using an electric mixer, beat cream cheese and butter together in a large bowl until thoroughly combined and smooth.
3. Slowly add in powdered sugar while mixing at low speed.
4. Add vanilla extract and mix it in the frosting.

Frosting the Cake

1. Place one layer on a cake plate and spread frosting on top of the layer.
2. Place the second layer on top.
3. Spread frosting on the top and sides of the cake.

CopyKat Tip: To keep frosting from getting on your cake plate, put strips of parchment paper under the sides of the cake. Frost the cake then pull out the strips.

Nutty Zucchini Cake Garnish

1. Lightly toast black walnuts in the oven at 350 degrees for 8 minutes.
2. Cool and chop the walnuts if they are not already chopped.
3. Sprinkle the walnuts on top of the cake.

Recipe Notes

Keep the cake covered and refrigerated when not serving.

Can’t find or don’t care for black walnuts? Use regular walnuts or pecans instead.

You can use a 9 X 13-inch pan to make a single-layer zucchini sheet cake.

If you want to bake the cake in a 10-inch tube or bundt pan, you will need to increase the bake time. It will take approximately 1 hour.

Love homemade cake? Try these recipes!

• Best Funnel Cake Recipe
• co*ke Cake Recipe
• Duncan Hines Sock It To Me Cake
• Gingerbread Cake Recipe
• Hershey Bar Cake Recipe
• Jello Cake Recipe
• Orange Pineapple Cake
• Pistachio Cake Recipe
• Pound Cake Using Cake Mix
• Rhubarb Coffee Cake

Favorite Summer Recipes

• Bisquick Peach Cobbler Recipe
• Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream
• Peach Cheesecake Recipe

Check out more of my easy cake recipes and the best recipes for summer here on CopyKat!

Recipe source: Judy Eynard. Pueblo, Co. 1980.