Chocolate Chip Zucchini Muffins

There is almost nothing better than tweaking a recipe and having it turn out perfection!  Last night we had sauteed zucchini with dinner, and I had one large zucchini still waiting to be used up.  I immediately thought about making zucchini bread, but I decided to go with muffins because it's easier for the kids (and inherently portion size).

As I started looking for a good zucchini muffin recipe, I realized most of them adapt a recipe for a couple of loaves of zucchini bread into 2 dozen muffins.  I only wanted to make one batch of muffins, and I didn't want to mess with halving a recipe.  So I kept looking.  Finally I found this recipe for zucchini muffins with carrots.  I love a good carrot muffin, but that wasn't what I was looking for today.  The recipe was workable, but needed a few tweaks. With those tweaks, it turned out amazing!

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Muffins

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1/3 cup applesauce
• 2 large eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 large zucchini (unpeeled), grated
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

• Recipe adapted from SouthernFood.About.Com

Directions:

Grease 12 muffin cups and preheat oven to 375°.  Mix oil, applesauce, eggs, sugar and vanilla extra in a large bowl until thoroughly combined.  Stir together flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon.  Add to wet ingredients, and mix just until combined.  Stir in zucchini and chocolate chips.

Spoon into muffin cups, filling at least 2/3 of the way full.  Bake for 20 minutes.  Cool in muffin pan for 5 minutes and then remove.  Enjoy!

These turned out so perfectly moist and incredibly delicious.  The kids go nuts for them because of the chocolate chips.  Neither of them cared much for the sauteed zucchini with dinner, but both of them were jumping up and down for these!  I'm going to have to use this one for a school snack one day.  There are twelve kids in my son's class so this makes just the right amount!