Chocolate Zucchini Muffins

My inspiration:  find here



 and because of this:



this very large zucchini was hiding amongst the leaves and vines in my garden


What do you do when you have a very large zucchini?  You cut it up, grate it, freeze it and make chocolate zucchini muffins.

I cut this zucchini first into about 8 pieces, sliced the seeds off and than sent it through my Bosch grater (I will have you know my Bosch was a wedding gift from my mom, so it is 30 years old and still running, although I do not use it very much any more)

sliced zucchini, you can see where I sliced the seeds off in the top half of the picture



grated zucchini, I leave the skin on but make sure it is washed and rinsed well

There was a lot of grated zucchini, my recipe only called for 1 cup and I had 7 cups of grated zucchini. I chose to divide it into 1 1/2 cup servings and place inside ziploc bags and freeze for later use.



I remembered to label the bags with date and amounts too

 Ingredients:  Makes 12 regular sized muffins and 1 mini loaf

1 C white flour
1 C whole wheat flour
3 T unsweetened cocoa powder
1 T baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 C honey
1 1/4 milk
1/4 C applesauce
1 C grated zucchini
1 egg
1/2  C Semi-sweet chocolate chips
Heat oven to 350 degrees, grease muffin pan.

Mix the dry ingredients together.  Add the honey, milk and applesauce, mix together gently until it is all integrated.  Add the egg and fold it in.  Add the zucchini and mix until it is spread through out the batter. Fold in the chocolate chips.



Zucchini batter

Pour or spoon the batter evenly among the muffin cups.  I had enough leftover to pour into a greased (pammed) mini loaf, it filled it a little more than halfway.

Place muffin tins and loaf pan into the oven. 
Bake muffins for 15 to 20 minutes.
Bake mini loaf for 35 to 40 minutes.
Test doneness by inserting a knife into muffin and bread. If it comes out wet, you need to bake a little longer, if it comes out basically clean, everything is done.

Cool on baking rack.

I did not let these cool, because we were hungry and ready to eat.

We split them open and added a little butter. This was so delicious.



Look at that yummy goodness

 The leftovers we had for breakfast - warmed in the microwave for a few seconds and cold another time.  They were good both ways.  

After the loaf was finished I left it on the counter to cool and went outside to water my backyard.  I came in to discover that Pippin had thought it smelled good also and decided to taste it.  He did not eat it, but yanked out a couple of pieces.

I decided it was too good to throw away so I cut out around where he bit.  So much for giving it to a neighbor. So be warned that it smells really yummy too.




The cut out after the cat left his teeth marks in it.