2 eggs
2 cups shredded zucchini
1 3/4 cup flour
1 cup buttermilk
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup cocoa
1/3 cup chopped pecans
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon allspice
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour or line* 12 wells in a muffin tin. Set aside. In a large bowl, mix together the eggs, oil and buttermilk. Add in all of the dry ingredients, including spices. Mix thoroughly. Stir in pecans and zucchini. Fill the prepared wells about 3/4 of the way. Bake 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the center muffin comes out mostly clean.
*On a side note, I really like a new Martha Stewart cupcake/muffin liners. You can still see the pattern of the liners even when the cake is dark unlike most Wilton liners where the pattern/design totally disappears with a dark batter.
My thoughts:
I have sort of mixed feelings about chocolate zucchini muffins. I have seen recipes for years for various incarnations with and without chips or nuts and never got around to making them. I sort of liked the idea, but it also smacked of “here’s a fun way to trick your kids into eating vegetables”, which I always find unappealing. Anyway, Matt was reading a cookbook the other day and they had recipe for chocolate zucchini muffins. He had never heard of them before and immediately wanted to make them, but we decided to hold off until this weekend when his parents would be in town. I am glad we did, the recipe was sort of bizarre (almost an equal amount of sugar as flour and some other oddities) so I scraped it entirely and made my own. The recipe I came up with was much less sweet, and with (I bet) a stronger chocolate flavor. I also don’t like nuts in my muffins so I made two plain and stirred nuts into the rest. The muffins are very, very moist and not too sweet so you don’t run into the whole “are these muffins or are these cupcakes debate”.
I like zucchini bread … haven’t had chocolate zucchini muffins, and these look more dense. Is the zucchini meant to bind the batter, and maybe add fiber to make them more healthful? I’ve always wondered about such.
These are actually not dense at all. Extemely moist and fluffy.I really have no idea why zucchini came into being such a muffin staple, I always thought to use up a large home crop?
My mom has a great chocolate and zucchini bread/muffin recipe. It’s enormous because it’s designed to use up some of the zucchini that overruns the garden. The recipe makes a ridiculous amount of muffins.
It does produce … and produce and produce. They’re eventually hard to get rid of! (I can only eat so much sauteed squash and onions.) I guess the darkness made me think they might be dense? I’m used to a crumbier look of the bread. (Crumbier?) Regardless, the chocolateness makes them look very tasty.
I don’t know…skip the veggies and add more chocolate!
When my 18 month old daughter wants “‘offee” what she really wants is chocolate zucchini bread. I try to convince myself that the zucchini makes it healthy…? I’m going to try this at home and see if I can keep her from becoming a coffee house addict. “‘offee? ‘offee? shoe. shoe.”
I love anything that is chocolate without being too sweet. Were those muffins really that dark in real life? They look really decadent.
Actually, my hands-down favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe involves zucchini. They’re light, and kind of fluffy, and moist. It’s my grandmother’s recipe and she is the queen of taking a perfectly good recipe and ruining it by adding too many other things. This was the only recipe she didn’t add double chocolate chunks and nuts to (which I don’t like in muffins or chocolate chip cookies, myself.)
I think I’ll have to try these!
Mallow: they really were that dark! No tweaking of the color at all. I was surprised they were that dark, frankly.
Jenn: those cookies sound yummy.I don’t like nuts in my cookies/muffins either!
These look delicious and I am intrigued by the addition of zucchini. Zucchini is coming with a vengeance and so I will give this one a try.
What about adding a teaspoon of plain cream cheese into the centre — maybe filling the cup half way, plopping that in and then filling the remainder. Might be really tasty!!
Hmmm…I made these and removed them when fork inserted in center came out clean, but when removing them from pan after cooling found that they didn’t pull away from the paper liners and were pudding-like in the bottoms. Any suggestions?
Anon- did they cool completely? It sounds like they were either still warm or they were slightly undercooked.
When I told my 7 year old daughter I was making these she said, "that's weird and cool at the same time"!
Also, I wondered if there shouldn't there be salt in the recipe?
Thanks for a great blog!
Rebecca-
No.
I had the same problem as anon. Very wet batter (like cake batter),and after 45 minutes they were still pudding like on bottom. I let one batch cool, thinking that would help, but they stayed wet. The other batch, I kept putting them back in the oven. Not sweet, which I like, but not very chocolately, either (used Trader Joes baking cocoa).
Anon
Perhaps your zucchini is too wet. Natural ingredients have variations that can affect the finished product.