Our neighbor gave us the world's largest zucchini the other day. How big, you ask?
Since someone is almost 10 months old, aka an excuse to make cupcakes, I wondered if such a thing exists as zucchini cupcakes. Yes, indeed! I found a recipe. I was intrigued by the pairing with "creamy caramel frosting". I vowed to follow the recipe as closely as possible. I also began to chant "zucchini cupcake" over and over in a highly charicatured French accent, which helps draw out the full summer vegetable flavor of these delightful cakes.
Category is: baking blog realness. For those who might not know what cracked eggs look like.
One zucchini bread down, and look how much still remains?!
The grisly remains of the shredding.
This zucchini will not be vanquished.
In this photo, you can see the remains of our cherished strainer... I whacked it too hard!
This recipe makes 17 unevenly filled cupcakes with enough batter left over to elegantly be-dollop your pans.
Unfrosted cakes, chilling out.
Making the creamy caramel frosting.
These turned out really good, I'd say (humbly, of course)! I cut the sugar in the cakes down to 1 cup and only added about 1 cup of confectioner's sugar to the frosting mix, but they still came out quite sweet. The recipe calls for 1 tsp almond extract and 1/2 tsp ground cloves. Surely, I thought to myself, that is waaaay too much almond extract and not enough cloves, so I added ~0.75 tsp almond extract and a heaping 1/2 tsp of cloves. That is, I didn't honor my vow. And I should have remained true to the recipe, since the cakes had only the barest, tantilizing trace of almond extract, which was just slightly overpowered by clove. It's almost as if the person who wrote this recipe, i.e. Virginia Lapierre of Greensboro Bend, Vermont, knows her way around a cupcake.
I would totally make these again! They have a festive, holiday vibe. Perhaps I'll shred-'n'-freeze the rest of that zucchini and save for Xmas!