These muffins are a perfect collision of two activities. First, I was cleaning up leaves in our yard and I found some hidden zucchinis, just lurking in the garden, surreptitiously growing into giants. After harvesting and eating a bunch of zucchinis this summer, and then harvesting, storing, and throwing away a few more (oops), I had been ignoring my plants for the past few months, thinking that they were done producing and I was done eating. Yeah, I guess I was wrong on both accounts. There were actually a couple more zucchini recipes I hadn’t gotten around to trying, so after a break from zucchini, I was glad to have them.

The other thing that played a part in the baking of these muffins was that we started watching The Great British Baking Show (actually The Great British Bake Off, everywhere else). A bunch of friends had been talking up this show, and this weekend’s dark, rainy weather seemed like a perfect time to give it a try. It’s delightful, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making us very hungry for baked goods. Surely we can’t be the only ones with this problem. After we watched the first episode or two on Netflix and discussed how we were both craving cake, I asked Steven what I should bake. He suggested zucchini bread, and that’s when I remembered that I’d been wanting to try making chocolate zucchini bread.

And so here we are. I wasn’t even planning on putting this recipe on the blog, but they turned out so good that I figured I should share in case the universe is sending other people sneaky zucchini. Even if you think you don’t like zucchini, as long as you like chocolate, you’ll like these, because the zucchini is barely noticeable. But you can feel virtuous for eating a serving of vegetables along with your chocolate. That’s a winning combo as far as I’m concerned.

After I’d already started making this recipe, I realized that I didn’t have the right size of loaf pan, so I used this recipe’s muffin adaptation. But it can also be made in loaf form.