…Posts Tagged ‘lemon juice’…

Zucchini Lemon Muffins

I really enjoy baked goods with vegetables in it (shocker, I know) like carrot cake, carrot muffins, and zucchini muffins but the thought of having to grate the vegetable to bake with it always discouraged me from baking my own version of these treats. I finally relented when I had a work celebration because I wanted to make a HEALTHY breakfast treat since our office is always laden with fatty snacks.

I found this Cooking Light zucchini lemon muffin recipe  that looked pretty basic. As I was going through the recipe, I thought that there was very little sugar considering there was a VEGETABLE in the recipe but I followed through. The outcome? It was hardly sweet, which is fine when you’re in the mood for something healthy, but I think for the first time ever, I would recommend adding just another 1/4 of a cup of sugar if you’re bringing it to a party. That being said, my coworkers did eat the muffins but some (including me!) ate it with some sweet lemon curd, which was actually the perfect topping since there are hints of lemon in this recipe.

I am now officially obsessed with lemon curd, by the way.

So here’s the recommended recipe…

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cups sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons grated lemon rind
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/2 cup coarsely shredded zucchini (one whole medium zucchini)
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
3/4 cup skim milk
3 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large egg
cooking spray

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, lemon rind, salt, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Make a well in the center, like so:

In a separate bowl, combine zucchini, milk, lemon juice, oil, and egg and stir well. Add to the flour mixture and mix until just combined.

Pour batter in a 12 muffin tin that has been coated with cooking spray. Bake for 20 or until the tops are golden brown (I think I ended up baking for about 23 minutes) Remove from pans immediately and let  cool on a wire rack.

It turns out grating zucchini is no big deal. I am going to conquer the grated carrot, though, since I’ve had an amazing pineapple carrot muffin from the farmer’s market that I’ve been meaning to replicate.

Again, if you want to be uber-healthy, just use 1/2 cup of sugar or even a little less. If you’re serving it to the masses unadorned, though, I would highly recommend increasing it to 3/4 cup of sugar. Trust me on this.

OR if you, like me, can’t get enough of lemon curd, cut the sugar to 1/3 cup and serve with a generous helping of lemon curd. YUM.