What to Do with Excess Zucchini: Chocolate Zucchini Carrot Cupcakes

What do you do with the over abundance of zucchini from your garden? You can freeze some. There is only so much fresh zucchini you can eat. You can give it to a soup kitchen; however, when they start turning you down... You have to figure something out or you may lose friends as you plead with, I mean try to give it away.

Finally, when I was ready to give up and throw the extra zucchini on the compost pile a friend gave me a Chocolate Zucchini Cupcake Recipe. The original recipe was from Rebar: Modern Food Cookbookby Audrey Alsterburg & Wanda Urbanowicz (Big Ideas Publishing, 2001. However, no recipe that comes into our home remains un-altered, this one is no exception.

The original recipe called for ¾ cup of vegetable oil. I usually substitute 1/4c of applesauce for the oil to make the recipe more figure friendly. Some of the spices, and amounts of the spices were changed (I'm too not fond of allspice). Extra cocoa was added to give it more chocolate flavor. My friend uses coconut oil instead of the vegetable oil; however, my family doesn't like coconut. So feel free to tamper and play with the recipe. That is part of the fun of cooking. So here is my recipe for Chocolate Zucchini Carrot Cupcakes.

Chocolate Zucchini Carrot Cupcakes

1 ½ cups brown sugar
¼ cup melted butter
½ cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 ½ tsp vanilla
½ cup buttermilk
¼ cup applesauce
1 ½ cups grated zucchini (squeeze out the excess moisture)
½ cup grated carrots
1 cup chocolate chips
2 cups unbleached flour
1 ¼ cup cocoa, sifted
½ tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ginger
1 ½ tsp cinnamon

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease large muffin pans; line the muffin pans with cupcake papers.

In a medium bowl, mix together sugar, butter, and oil. Beat in eggs, one at a time until well incorporated. Stir in vanilla, buttermilk, zucchini, carrots, applesauce and chocolate chips.

In a separate bowl mix together all of the dry ingredients. Add the liquid ingredients and mix until well combined. Spoon the batter into the large muffin pans. Bake in the center of the oven for about 35 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

Yields 9 large cupcakes or 20 standard cupcakes