Shhh! They are good for you!

My cousin brought me three zucchini from her garden. 3 GIANT foot long baseball bat thick zucchini!! What to do? What to do? Muffins!! And how about Chocolate in them too?!? YES!!

The first thing I did was grate all of the zucchini. I discovered through looking at over a dozen recipes that you can freeze grated zucchini to use at another time. I ended up with almost 12 cups grated zucchini! Woohoo!!

I mentioned in previous posts that I've been trying cut down on the amount of refined and processed foods we eat. And I am moving our family towards a more gluten free diet (I'm not quite ready to give up bread though!)  So I did an online search and looked at recipe after recipe. I found a bunch of great recipes, but most were complicated or had unusual ingredients. Here is the recipe I ended up creating based on what I have in the house:

Cocolicious Zucchini Muffins
DRY INGREDIENTS:

1 cup old fashioned oats

1 cup almond meal

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 Tbsp cinnamon 

1 Tbsp cocoa powder

WET INGREDIENTS:

2 cups shredded zucchini (squeezed dry)

3 Tbsp flax meal + 9 Tbsp water (or 3 eggs)

1/4 cup coconut oil

1/2 cup raw honey (or use agave if you are looking to make these vegan)

Non- stick cooking spray

Chocolate chips (optional)

DIRECTIONS:

1) Preheat oven to 350* and grease your muffin tin (makes 12 muffins)

2) In a food processor, pulse oats & almond meal until a fine flour is achieved.

3) In a medium sized bowl, whisk all the dry ingredients making sure there are no lumps & everything is combined. Set aside.

4) In a large bowl, combine all the wet ingredients. Then stir in the dry.

5) Divide the batter evenly to achieve 12 muffins. The cups will be 2/3 to 3/4 full.

6) Bake for 20-25 minutes, until a toothpick inserted cones out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 10 minutes before removing to a cooling rack to cool completely.

And here are the coco zucchini muffins in all their dense cocoa good for you tasty glory. You'll notice I decided to pile some up with chocolate chips - I put them on right out of the oven so that they are nice and gooey. Try them, I DOUBLE DOG DARE YOU!