If you know me very well, you know I love brownies.  These fudgy brownies to be exact.  So while coming up with zucchini recipes, of course I experimented to come up with a zucchini brownie recipe. 

Zucchini Brownies

1/2 cup butter, melted
1 1/2 cups sucanat or rapadura
1/3 cup cocoa
1 cup shredded zucchini
1 egg
2 cups whole wheat flour

Mix butter, sucanat and cocoa.  Stir in zucchini and egg.  Gradually mix in flour until well combined.  Pour batter into a 9×13 inch pan.  Bake in a 350° oven for 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Since I’m getting vegetable in every moist, chocolaty bite…do you think I can justify eating twice as many?

Just wondering.  :)

Be sure to check out these zucchini recipes also: 

•  Zucchini Cake
• Cheeseburger Zucchini Boats
• Whole Wheat and Honey Zucchini Bread and Muffins
• Chocolate Chip Zucchini Cookies and Bars

AND, if you want even more zucchini recipes, check out Tammy’s Recipe swap today!   We really might just all turn into zucchinis.
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This post is linked to the In Season Recipe Swap and Works for me Wednesday.

With all these zucchini experiments you might think that I don’t have any more huge zucchini in my kitchen any more.  Oh but you’d be wrong.  There’s still a big huge one on my countertop waiting to be played with.  I’ve still got a Zucchini Brownie recipe coming for you…and in case you missed them…here are more zucchini recipes you might be interested in:  Chocolate Chip Zucchini Cookies and Bars; Cheeseburger Zucchini Boats; Whole Wheat and Honey Zucchini Bread and Muffins.

This cake was maybe my favorite of all the experiments.  It was really, really good (and by was, I mean that every last piece is gone).  Of course I happen to think cream cheese frosting makes everything good!

Whole Wheat Zucchini Cake

2 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups sucanat or rapadura
1 t. baking powder
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. cinnamon
2 cups shredded zucchini
2 eggs
1/2 c. butter, melted

Stir together dry ingredients.  Mix in zucchini, eggs and butter.  Pour batter into a buttered 9×13 inch baking dish.  Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Allow cake to cool completely.  Frost with Cream Cheese Frosting.  Below are two recipe choices:

Sorta-Naughty (But at Least the Sugar is Unbleached) Cream Cheese Frosting

1/2 cup melted butter
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 t. vanilla
4 1/2 cups organic/unbleached powdered sugar

Cream butter and cream cheese together.  Add vanilla.  Beat powdered sugar in gradually until you reach the right consistency.

Not-So-Naughty (But Still Really Good) Cream Cheese Frosting

1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
3 ounces cream cheese
1 t. vanilla
4 T. honey

Whip cream until soft peaks form.  In a separate bowl, stir cream cheese, vanilla and honey together until smooth.  Gently fold in whipped cream.

Either frosting recipe is really good…the latter one is just a bit more natural and healthy.

If you like carrot cake…we all kinda thought this cake tasted a lot like carrot cake.  Mmmm!

(If you don’t like carrot cake, then this cake tasted nothing like carrot cake.)  You should totally try it.  ;)
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This post is linked to Frugal Fridays.

Tis the season for zucchini to grow into the size of baseball bats (and be used as such if you live at my house).  Tis the season for everyone to lock their doors while at church…just to prevent someone from unloading their overgrown zucchini into other people’s cars when no one’s looking.  Tis the season for people to start offering to pay you money just to take zucchini off their hands.

It’s amazing how one little hill can produce enough zucchini to fill an entire kitchen.  (Did I mention that I didn’t even plant zucchini this year?!)

We’ve eaten a bunch of zucchini in stir fry or simply sauted it in a bit of olive oil.  It’s SO good like that.  I’ve already shredded a bunch and put it into the freezer.  Now, I’m on a quest to figure out some great recipes that will sneak zucchini into a variety of dishes, making them more nutritious.  And well…a zucchini can only serve as a baseball bat for so long.  Eventually it must be eaten.

I don’t like eating a huge zucchini as is.  The seeds are larger than my teeth and the skin is tougher than I prefer.  I like shredding the large ones in my food processor and stirring them into zucchini bread (whole wheat and honey recipe coming soon). 

While making zucchini bread last week (and then looking around at all the other huge zucchini in my kitchen) I realized that surely one could come up with a cookie, or at least a cookie bar that included zucchini.  So I tinkered around.  I discovered this:  Cookies are a delicious way to eat more zucchini. 

Here’s the recipe I came up with:

Giant Chocolate Chip Zucchini Cookies

2 cups shredded zucchini
1/2 cup melted butter
1 cup organic sucanat (dehydrated cane sugar juice)
1 egg
1/2 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
3/4 cup chocolate chips

Shred zucchini (I use a food processor).  In a large mixing bowl mix sucanat, flour, salt and baking soda.   Stir in shredded zucchini, melted butter and egg.  Fold in chocolate chips.  Use a large scoop to put 1 1/2 T. sized balls of dough onto a cookie sheet.  Bake in a 350° oven for 15 minutes.  Makes about 20 giant cookies.

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bars

Follow the same recipe as above, only spread the dough into a 9×13 inch pan.  Bake in a 350° oven for 20-25 minutes.

My husband, kids and I all loved these.  Zucchini makes them moist…and of course chocolate makes everything good.

Coming up in my next Zucchini Recipes post…I’ll share my whole wheat and honey zucchini bread and muffin recipe!
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Go check out  Amy’s awesome list of zucchini recipes!

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I posted about making homemade chocolate chips a long time ago.  Since that time and especially within the past few weeks, I’ve received several emails asking for more help and detail about how this works.  It seems that many of you who tried the recipe are having trouble getting everything to melt and dissolve and mix like it should.

In light of your chocolate chip frustration…I decided to do a more thorough tutorial about how I make chocolate chips.  Chocolate and frustration should never be in the same sentence together.  Ever.

You can use coconut oil or butter to make your chips.  I used butter this time because I’m almost out of coconut oil.  Butter doesn’t quite work as well as coconut oil.  They tend to be softer with butter…but still oh so good.  Especially when you put them in these.

Here again is the recipe:

Homemade Chocolate Chips

1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup rapadura or sucanat
1 cup coconut oil or butter
1 T. vanilla

Begin by placing the cocoa, sucanat and butter (or coconut oil) into a quart sized jar. 

Fill a small saucepan with two or three inches of water.  Place the jar into the saucepan/water.  Turn the heat on medium/high to begin melting the butter.

Stir often.  After five minutes, my mixture looked like this:

To take each picture, I pulled the jar out of the pan of water.  The steam was fogging up my camera lense!  I quickly put the jar back into the water to resume melting process.  Just telling you that so you know that you don’t have to pull your jar out of the pan every five minutes.  But you already knew that, right?

After ten minutes, my mixture looked like this:

It took a total of thirteen minutes for the butter to completely melt.  I then pulled it out of the water, added the vanilla and stirred well.

The mixture in my jar looked and smelled SO GOOD that I wanted to drink it.  But I didn’t.  That would have made quite a mustache. 

Pour the mixture into a 9×13 inch pan covered with parchment paper.  Spread it as evenly as you can. 

As you can hopefully tell from the following picture, I still have a little sucanat that refused to completely dissove.  Can you see the bits of chunkyness?  That’s been one of the questions I’ve received from several of you.  But…the little bits of chunkyness don’t hurt anything.  My chocolate chips tasted just fine!

Place your pan into the refrigerator.  It takes a couple of hours for the chocolate to harden.  Once it’s hardened, remove it from the parchment paper and break it into chunks.  Store in refrigerator in an airtight container (unless you and your family eat them all first).

I hope this is helpful!  It’s very fun to make your own chocolate chips and oh so very yummy!

And now…no matter how hot it is today…I may need to use my freshly made chocolate chips to bake brownies.  After I eat some green beans and broccoli from my garden of course…

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