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Our school gardening club season is nearly at an end. Being fair-weather gardeners, we like to take a break over the winter months. This summer we’ve grown salads, flowers, herbs and vegetables . There are still parsnips and swedes waiting to be harvested, but most of the crops have done their growing, been picked or pulled, and either taken home by the gardening club members or used in the school kitchen. Yesterday we spent a good hour or so weeding, brushing up the leaves that had fallen around the raised beds, and pulling up the tomato plants. As we were working, ladybirds began crawling about on the edges of the raised beds and the steps between them. There must have been 20 or more of them – a lot to see all at once after a summer of very few of these insects.
There were ladybird larvae too. Odd looking creatures with no clues as to the pretty insects they turn in to.
The adult ladybirds had unusual patterns – not the usual seven black spots on red. When I got home I looked them up, only to discover that they could well be harlequin ladybirds… the invasive species that’s relatively new here and seen as a potential threat to our native ladybird species. These big, mean ladybirds have huge appetites and eat aphids in large quantities. When the aphids are getting to be a bit thin on the ground, these invaders aren’t averse to eating native ladybirds to keep them going. I’ve not seen harlequin ladybirds before, so to suddenly find them in such numbers is a worry.
After we’d admired the ladybirds (before we knew what kind of ladybirds they were), we started work on the tomatoes, collecting the fruit before pulling up the plants and adding them to the compost heap. A long time ago, during a gap year after university, I worked in the packing shed at a tomato farm in Australia – long hours sorting tomatoes into boxes ready for market. The tomatoes were boxed up according to how ripe they were. So, the ripe, red fruit went all together in one box, green fruit in another and in between there were three other, subtly different, shades of green/red to be sorted into separate boxes. It took a few hours on the first day to learn precisely which tomato should be in which box. But we did learn and by the second day of packing tomatoes, the more experienced women working there were no longer picking out stray fruit and putting them in the correct boxes.
The tomatoes from the school garden were probably in all those five shades of tomato ripeness, but to make things easy we sorted them into just two categories – green and red. The ripe, red fruit were taken away to be turned into soup. The green tomatoes looked like they might be more of a challenge to turn into something edible. I wanted to come up with a something that I could make for our last gardening club meeting in a couple of weeks’ time, and something a group of five to eleven year olds would be likely to try… cake seemed like a good solution, but green tomato cake? As usual, even the most quirky sounding idea has already been tried and tested. Search ‘green tomato loaf’ online and you end up with a whole variety of recipes. I took the best features from three different recipes, combined them and came up with this recipe. A not too sweet cake with plenty of flavour from the spices. The green tomatoes don’t add much in the way of flavour but, like the carrots in a carrot cake, give the loaf moisture and a good texture.
As well as tomatoes, this very good cake contains walnuts… which just happen to be the one ingredient in October’s One Ingredient challenge. The challenge is jointly hosted by Laura at How to Cook Good Food and Nazima who writes at Franglais Kitchen. This month is Laura’s turn to host, and there’s already a long list of recipes using walnuts to be found over on her blog.
Spiced green tomato cake
200g coarsely grated green tomatoes
225g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch of salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
2 eggs, lightly beaten
150g light brown soft sugar
½ cup rapeseed oil
½ Greek yoghurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
75g raisins
50g walnuts, roughly chopped
Preheat oven to 180oC, 350oF, gas 4. Line an 8”x4” loaf tin with baking parchment.
Put the grated tomatoes into a colander or sieve and leave over a bowl or sink to drain while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.
Sift the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda into a large bowl. Add the salt, cinnamon and nutmeg and stir to combine everything.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, oil, yoghurt and vanilla extract until you have an even mixture. Add the egg mix to the dry ingredients and stir gently, when the flour is almost completely mixed in, add the raisins and walnuts and continue to stir until everything is combined, taking care not to over mix.
Pour the cake mix into the prepared tin and bake for about 1 hour – check after 45 minutes. The cake is ready when a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.
Leave the cake to cool in the tin for about 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before serving.
I added drizzle of lime icing (about 1/2 tbsp icing sugar to 2 tbsp) to top off the cake, but you can leave it plain or use a cream cheese icing similar to carrot cake… or whatever takes your fancy. Enjoy with a good cup of coffee.
That photgraph of the ladybird is truly breathtaking… Amazing clarity and exposure – superb!
Thank you! He/she wasn’t in a rush to go anywhere, just sitting looking mean, so I had plenty of time to work with.
I love using home grown fruit and veg in my cakes and think it is becoming more popular to use them in sweet bak. Even thought tomatoes are a fruit i still think of them as more of a savoury ingredient which is silly really. Home grown tomatoes are something I have never managed to harvest successfully but adding them to a wonderful cake is a very good idea and one that children would definitely enjoy. Thanks for entering one Ingredient!
I think you’re right – beetroot and courgette cakes are definitely the trendy things to be baking now! This one is a lot like carrot cake really, but faced with a bucketful of green tomatoes to use up I’m adapting as many recipes as I can!
Wonderful photo, even though he’s a baddie. The cake looks delicious, clever you finding something so lovely to do with green tomatoes. I bet the school garden club is great fun for the children, especially when there’s cake.
It’s been great to have an enthusiastic bunch of young gardeners at the club this year… and yes, the promise of a bit of cake does help keep them working!
green toms in cake! awesome!! I’m bookmarking this one for when we get a good supply in a couple of months 🙂
Hope you enjoy it – although with your climate, you probably don’t have the same problem of unripe green tomatoes at the end of the season…
We used to have so many of those ladybirds in Essex, but I see fewer of them in Norfolk. The idea of the green tomato loaf is fabulous – such a change from green tomato chutney. We are inundated with walnuts here, so anything walnutty is most welcome!
A glut of walnuts must be wonderful! Check out the recipes on Laura’s blog if you’re looking for some ideas for using all the walnuts.
What a great use for green tomatoes! All mine went into chutney this year but I will bear this in mind for the future. Will you come and take the photos for my blog, please? 😉
I’ll tell you the secret of getting the odd decent photo here at the garden deli – take lots of pictures, then take some more, discard all those that are out of focus/have missed the subject because it flew away/are blurred because the camera or plant moved, and then use the remaining one photo on the blog!
Your cake looks delicious – anything with cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins and walnuts has to be good!
Absolutely – the spices are all important! And the basic recipe would probably work just as well with carrot or apple in place of the tomatoes.
Sounds a great recipe, I’ll definately try it this week as this year there are some green tomatoes, other years I haven’t had any at the end of the season. I’ve already made green tomato chutney which I love but you can only eat so much in a year. Only problem withthe recipe is that 200 g is hardly going to reduce a glut of green tomatoes!
You’ll need to make a really big cake! And if you still have some green tomatoes left, green tomato salsa is delicious – I made some tonight and nearly ate the whole pot by myself…
The cake does look good – I didn’t even have many green tomatoes left this year, after a very poor harvest. We have got those ladybirds here too, but fortunately not in large numbers in my garden, and still many of the “normal” ones.
I suppose invasive species like the harlequins are a side effect of a world that’s so well connected and of shipping food and plants in from all over the globe.
Well I learn something new everyday – tomato loaf. Who knew ?!
New one to me too – but one thing I’ve learned from blogging is that you can type pretty much any weird and wonderful combination of ingredients into google, and there’s someone out there who’s already made a cake/soup/cookies… with them!
Looks great, wouldn’t have thought of using green tomatoes in a cake but lovely idea! I was going to try a green tomato curry soon instead of the usual green tomato chutney. Wonderful photos, of the ladybirds and the cake.
Green tomato curry sounds like a good idea… there are still an awful lot of them in the bucket, so I might well try that too – thanks!
Have you tried green tomato mincemeat? It’s surprisingly good. Love your photos of the ladybirds.
No, but it’s gone on the list and I’ve already looked up some recipes online – thank you for the idea!
That cake looks wonderfully moist.
Thanks Bridget! It was good – and wasn’t around long enough to get dry and stale… always a good sign!
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we had some green tomatoes. Not enough for something like this. I have seen someone else make a tomato cake before but have not tried it. Yours looks lovely , thanks so much for linking to one ingredient
Thanks Nazima! I think you could probably substitute apples for tomatoes in this recipe – might just need to do a bit of juggling with quantities… I was planning to give it a try soon with some of the apple glut that we have this year!
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