I have been on a cookie kick. I like to lie to myself and say they’re good for me. They have fiber in them; they must be good for me. Every week or so I come up with a variation on my Kitchen Sink Cookie recipe (which you can find on my blog), this variation came to me after staring at a zucchini in my fridge for about a week. I didn’t want it to go to waste, but I wasn’t interested in eating it in pure zucchini form. Thus, the zucookie was born.
Before I give you the recipe let me tell you how I prepped the zucchini. I grated it on a cheese grater directly into a colander. Then I sprinkled it with salt, mixed it up good with my hand and then squeezed out the liquid by pushing the zucchini up against the bottom and sides of the bowl. I also used a cloth to sop up the moisture from the surface of the zucchini. It weighed out at exactly 6 ounces – that was sheer luck.
Almost everything in the recipe is measured by weight. Get a postal scale or borrow one from your dealer and pay them back in cookies. Professional baking recipes are always measured by weight. Baking is such a science you need to be exact, especially in the mixing order. There is so much going on with the molecules in that there bowl, if you don’t mix things in the proper order you’ll end up with a bunch of garbage instead of a batch of baked goods.
Zucookie Recipe
4 oz olive oil
7 oz white sugar
½ teaspoon salt
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1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla
1 heaping spoon of sour cream
6 oz shredded and squeezed zucchini
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6 oz AP flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
4 oz oats
2 Tablespoons milled flax seed
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4 oz chocolate chips
zest and juice of ½ an orange
I did all of the mixing with a rubber spatula, no electricity needed. Mix together your olive oil, sugar and salt. Then add your egg, vanilla, sour cream and zucchini and mix it all together – it’s a lovely shade of green at this point. Then add your dry ingredients which you have mixed together in a separate bowl to ensure equal distribution. Mix until the wet and the dry just start to come together and then add your chips, zest and juice. Then you can continue mixing until all the ingredients have come together and the chips are evenly distributed. This is a wet dough, don’t be alarmed. Use an ice cream scoop to portion out the dough onto greased cookie trays (or parchment lined) and then bake them at 350 for 20-25 minutes. I got 20 cookies out of this batch – 9 nicely spaced cookies on each try and two random globs of dough shoved into corners.
They were seriously good. My neighbor said “YUMMMMMMM!” She ate her half and then most of my half of the batch. So, yes, they were yum. The orange flavor was really nice and refreshing, the zucchini made the soft cookies nice and moist and the chocolate chips…well, they’re chocolate, what else do I need to tell you? These are some seriously soft cookies, like I said. If you eat them warm they’re super soft, if you wait until they cool they get a nice crunch on the outside but remain soft on the inside. If you pack them for the next day they lose that crunch, but your neighbor will love them anyway. So will you! And once you’re done eating you can feel good knowing you ate a veggie, a fruit and some fiber. And that’s no lie!
