Chocolate Chocolate Chip Zucchini Muffins

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I generally am not a muffin person. I don’t know why. I justprefer cookies. Or the occasional cake. Or, mmmm… ice cream. Or cheesecake…yum!Okay getting side tracked. Anyway, during my recent vacation I had an extrazucchini lying around (who doesn’t) and decided that zucchini muffins were theway to go. And not just plain old zucchini, but chocolate chocolate chipzucchini. I found the recipe on From Ketchup to Chutney and they turned outpretty good. I may have overbaked them just slightly because they weren’t asmoist as I would like, but still very tasty. And for anyone worried, you don’ttaste the zucchini at all.
I did make a few tiny adjustments. The original recipecalled for half wheat flour and half all-purpose flour and I just used AP flourfor the whole thing. It also called for plain yogurt and I used plain Greekyogurt since I had some. One little thing that threw me was the orange zest. Inthe future, I might leave it out. I’m not a big fan of chocolate and citrus,and the orange smell was definitely prevalent the first day. However it diddissipate after that first day, so maybe it’s fine. If you do like thecitrus-chocolate combination, by all means, leave it in. The recipe also saidthat it only made 24 mini-muffins but it made almost three times that.

1 ½ cups sugar
¾ cup vegetable oil
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs
1/3 cup plain Greek yogurt
2 ¼ cups shredded zucchini
Zest of 1 lemon
Zest of ½ orange
2 ½ cups white flour
½ cup cocoa powder
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
½ tsp ground cinnamon8 oz chocolate chips
Start by preheating the oven to 375 degrees. Either lineyour muffin tins or spray them with Pam. In a large bowl, beat or whisktogether the sugar, oil and vanilla, then beat in one egg at a time untilsmooth, followed by the yogurt. Stir in the citrus zest and the gratedzucchini.
I usually don’t advocate separate bowls for wet and dryingredients, but for this recipe I would make an exception. So in a separatebowl stir together your dry ingredients: flour, cocoa, baking soda, salt andcinnamon. Make sure they are mixed thoroughly. Add half the dry mixture to thewet mixture and stir (by hand, not mixer!) until it’s just mixed, before addingthe rest. You don’t want to overmix, so just make sure that it’s allincorporated and that’s it. Add in your chocolate chips and stir briefly.
Fill your muffin cups three quarters full and bake. I mademini muffins so I baked each batch about 13 minutes. If I did it again I mighttry a batch at 11 minutes and see if they are any more moist. Full size muffinscook for 15-20 minutes.
I think my favorite part of making these was giving some toa couple male friends (mostly for them to take to their families). I didn’tthink zucchini was such a weird ingredient but they both balked and said, “Chocolatechip—what?” Later one of them referred to the muffins as “Rutabaga-asparagus orsomething.” So I guess as long as your guests or kids aren’t as picky as thosetwo, you’ll be set.