Muffin Explosion

One zucchini left in the fridge! Time to make muffins. I heard zucchini can be substituted for apples in an apple pie recipe, so I was going to try that, but then I figured muffins were more bang for my buck. 

Jaron is still doing no added sugar, so I wanted to make sugar free muffins. Chat gpt gave me some suggestions on how to make my favorite zucchini muffin recipe sugar free. Use applesauce instead, skip sweeteners all together, use shredded apples and/or carrots. I decided to make all three plus another recipe for denser muffins to dip in soup. Not sure if I would like these iterations, I decided to make half recipes and made notes to keep them all straight...

Lots of shredding involved. 

On the left is applesauce instead of sugar. The right bowl has no sugar and no substitute. The dough was super crumbly. Maybe adding the zucchini would help. 

Same bowls with zucchini added. Didn't help the bowl on the right very much. 

The finished products. All in all, the applesauce ones were pretty good, not much sweetness at all; you couldn't taste the applesauce. The no additives batch was pretty bitter. You could really taste the baking soda/baking powder. I would probably add some sort of liquid to moisten them up if I made them again.

The next batch used carrot and apple shreds for moisture and sweetness.

They didn't add a lot of moisture, and turned out pretty much like the no additives batch - very crumbly with a bitter flavor. These tasted better just because of the carrot shreds.

The last batch I made required so many substitutions because I didn't have the ingredients handy that the recipe ended up nothing like the original. 😂 I'll have to make it again when I have everything. Here's a list of all my substitutions:

Still, I thought the muffins were decent. They cooked longer than they should have. The only reason I could tell that is because they ended up with a pretty thick crust. If I had taken them out a few minutes earlier, they would have been softer and no doubt more delicious.

The cheese definitely helped save them!.