It's the height of the harvest season, and I can't keep up with picking the runner beans, tomatoes and courgettes that are ripening on a daily basis. My mother has been the delighted recipient of a weeks worth of lettuce (for a rabbit:-)). The loganberries are falling off the vines, but theres just no time to pick & cook or freeze or give away everything.

This year I was lucky enough to be minding my neighbours garden during a period of peak production, so I ended up with several kilos of courgette that needed processing.

Theres only so much courgette you can eat – marinated, in salad, stuffed, fried, roasted. So I put my husband to work grating the courgettes, and Dara and I started baking. Lemon courgette muffins, lemon courgette bread, when we ran out of muffin tins, and (the favourite) chocolate courgette cake. What a good way to get your kids to eat vegetables.

You can’t really taste the courgettes, though you can see them in the lemon muffins. So picky 3 year olds can object to the green bits. But the chocolate cake cannot be objected to, and the courgettes give it a lovely moistness, so you can use less fat. Which is not an issue for the picky 3 year olds, but the diet conscious parents can equally enjoy it.

Some cakes were eaten immediately, the rest were tightly wrapped in cellophane, and frozen. Best to plan for a fairly empty freezer at this time of the year! Some went into the neighbours freezer – they were suppliers of the raw materials, after all.