Zucchini brownies? Not for me thanks!

Alternative title for this post: How to get kids to eat more vegetables. Or: How to mess with your friends who say they don’t eat vegetables. Or: A slightly healthier brownie recipe (but still includes sugar).

Not your typical background props for brownies

Zucchini was stalking me. It was like a green veggie monster lurking in every corner of my life saying “Eat me, eat me!” (In the creepiest veggie monster voice you can imitate). I was like, “ew, no! Vegetables!? Too much green! Too much health! Too much not chocolate!”

That peanut butter stripe… That melted dark chocolate… That richness that looks like it translates to goodness…

I figured though, since I had given in and made the carrot cupcakes, I would just have to give these babies a shot. Problem is, zucchini isn’t the same as it is overseas. We have mini zucchini, which I took an unfortunate while to realise is what we refer to as: baby marrow. I assume it’s the same thing???

I follow quite a lot of blogs, and there was a week where every single one of those blogs sent me some form of zucchini cake/brownie/muffin/savoury-thing recipe, and they all looked so amazing! But still… Vegetables… When I got this one from Yammie’s Gluten Freedom, I decided that that had to be the one. Her recipes are reliable, and her brownies have always come out tops in my books. Alas, my trust has been broken!!

Just kidding, she will always be amazing, and these brownies aren’t half bad. The peanut butter topping definitely makes them worthwhile. My major complaint with this recipe is that they kind of taste like vegetables… Kind of a lot… We gave some to a friend though who refuses to eat veggies – we didn’t tell him – he actually said he enjoyed them, and that they had a nutty flavour. So the key to this recipe is: deception. Obviously, as the baker, this didn’t work so well for me, and all I could taste was green…

Zucchini, baby marrow, grown up marrow, courgette, by any other name does not belong in a brownie

Zucchini brownies – made in SA

Ingredients

• 2 cups finely grated baby marrows/courgettes/zucchini (I used the zester to grate mine superfine – I didn’t feel like having huge chunks of the stuff)
• 1 C brown sugar
• 1 ¹⁄³ cup applesauce (mine was a good jar of the stuff)
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• ²⁄³ C oat flour/food-processed oats (ground down to a flour)
• 1 C cocoa powder
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 ½ tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp salt
• Additional: chocolate chips of whatever degree of healthiness suits your taste

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180ºC, and line a 11×11″ baking tray/dish
2. Mix the sugar, eggs, apple sauce, vanilla and baby marrows
3. Mix the oat flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and soda, cinnamon and salt together
4. Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture and mix well, ensuring there are no floury dry bits
5. Pour mixture into prepared pan/dish
6. Bake on the middle shelf for 1 hour
7. Remove and leave to cool before frosting – I frosted mine with melted chocolate and a mix of melted chocolate and peanut butter

Tagged: baby marrow, baking, brownie recipe, brownies, cake, chocolate, courgette, healthy, marrow, melted chocolate, peanut butter, recipe, yammies gluten freedom, zucchini, Zucchini brownies