Chocolate Cupcakes

These cupcakes have a fantastic flavor and a lot of moisture. The trick to get that wonderful moist cake flavor is zucchini, which I promise you will not taste. My husband was a little skeptical when he saw me putting the batter together, but he kept making "yum" noises while he was eating the cake and didn't really realize it until I pointed it out. These cupcakes are great with Chocolate Maple Icing. I would recommend keeping them in cupcake form, because they do tend to crumble a bit much for a clean cake cut.

My mom and one of my foodie friends felt that this was one of my best desserts yet. The flavor is very rich.

Chocolate Zucchini Cupcakes

1 cup brown rice flour
3/4 cup Sorghum flour
1/4 cup Tapioca Flour
1 1/2 cups sugar (See the bottom of this post for Sugar Free instructions)
1 vanilla bean scraped
3/4 cup cacao, sifted
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 cups zucchini (do not drain the juice from the shredded zucchini - add it to the cake)
1/2 cup olive oil

Sift all of the dry ingredients together, then fold in the zucchini and oil. The batter will seem really dry and dense. Not the typical cake consistency. Do not let this worry you; the zucchini lets off moisture as it cooks and gives it a fabulous moistness to the cake after baking.


You can see small streaks of zucchini in the cake before it's frosted. I frosted a portion and sent it home with my mom, and my grandmother called me to thank me for the yummy treats (I also sent home some peach raspberry pie). She could not believe it was gluten free, vegan, and had zucchini! If she had told my grandfather that before he had eaten the cake and raved about it, he wouldn't have touched it!

I made it in cake form, which is shown here. I really recommend this with Chocolate Maple Icing.

To make this cake cane sugar free, soak 20 pitted deglet dates for a minimum of 45 minutes. Throw the dates and 3/4 cup soak water into a blender with the vanilla and a 1/4 cup of agave, then combine with the rest of the cake ingredients as instructed above after you add the oil and zucchini.