Zucchini Brownies

Awe, summer months and your over-abundance of produce, how I love thee! I'm not much of a gardener (although I am trying to remedy that this year and hopefully in the years to come), but thanks to a friend who was up to her eyeballs in zucchini, I recently came into a great wealth of the yummy squash my ownself. Thankfully, I've been pinning all kinds of zucchini recipes on Pinterest, so I knew just what I wanted to do with these: zucchini brownies! In all honesty, the recipe is technically called "healthy zucchini brownies," but I think it's safe to say these taste good enough we should just hide that "healthy" word. haha.

Photo from Pinterest

This was, again, something I made while watching my niece and my nephews. Gabe was pretty much the only one who had to do hard labor for this project - grating the zucchini. Woohoo!

The two younger boys really enjoyed watching this (from a distance), so while Gabe grated the zucchini, I got the rest of the ingredients out. Once the zucchini was ready to go, all of the kids each had a turn putting ingredients into the bowl. This is the most exciting part of the food making process (other than eating, obviously). It's fun to see how excited they each get to add a little flour or honey or what-have-you. It makes the putting it together part way more fun.

One of the ingredients this recipe called for was cardamom, which is not something I had on hand so we simply omitted it and I did not find the brownies to be lacking at all.

After all was prepared, into the oven it went.

After it came out of the oven and had cooled, we each had a piece of this moist brownie. It was delightful. Would I say it tasted like a brownie? Not so much. It was more like cake. A very moist and delectable cake. The kids all enjoyed it, as did I. My mom and husband both tried it later but were a little disappointed in it because it was not as much like a brownie as they had expected. I suppose I should've warned them...oh well, more for me. MUWAHAHAHA!

The only thing I would do differently about this recipe next time is probably not add quite as much cinnamon as suggested. It was a little too cinnamon-y for me. Otherwise, this recipe is a definite keeper. The zucchini was hidden enough (not that I mind it not being hidden...I do like zucchini) that the kids enjoyed it and you wouldn't have even known it was there. It was a very healthy dish with the chocolate chips and sugar being the only not-so-healthy ingredients. I suppose you could say the cocoa isn't the healthiest either, but I choose to believe otherwise. The healthy side of this made this preggo woman feel not so guilty having "one more small bite." Yeah, I'd say this is one ya'll should try sometime. It's a good'n.