Ok, already I’m being disingenuous with the title of this post because none of the baking I’ve done has actually been with zucchini. It has all been done with some other form of summer squash. Mostly they’re interchangeable for this kind of thing though so I just used what I had on hand for recipes that all called for zucchini.

As is often the case at this time of year we start to get a little overwhelmed with vegetables from our CSA, especially if one or the other of us isn’t around to help eat them. We had a couple weeks back-to-back where either myself or my husband were gone for dinner more often than not so we started to get a little squash backlog going on in our crisper drawer. What should one do with lots of accumulating squash? Why bake of course. Bonus that I can tell myself that all these baked goods are healthy because they have vegetables in them. Never mind all the butter and sugar. I had 3 occasions recently to do some baking and tried out three different recipes with zucchini in them. Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the finished products so you will just have to use your imagination.

For the girls’ night I had a couple weekends ago I broke out a tried and true zucchini spice cake (with cream cheese frosting of course) recipe. It is super moist and delicious. There was half a cake left after the party so my coworkers got to enjoy the spoils, and I had several people stop by my office or email me to tell me how wonderful the cake was.

This past weekend we had two parties to go to on Saturday so I decided cookies would be a good way to go so I could split them up and take some to each party. I settled on these zucchini chocolate chip cookies. They had great reviews, so I was kind of disappointed with the end product. There was just something that didn’t sit quite right with me. The texture seemed to cake like for a cookie and flavor reminded me more of zucchini cake than a chocolate chip cookie but it wasn’t really like eating a cake either. I don’t know. Something about the combo didn’t work for me. Apparently I’m the outlier though because everyone at both parties was raving about how good the cookies were and I saw many people eating 3 or 4 of them. I probably won’t make them again because I prefer to bake things I myself enjoy, but I’m happy that other people found them more delectable than I did.

Finally, I made some zucchini brownies to bring to Wednesday night dinner this week. I used this recipe. As mentioned in the recipe the batter seems super dry, but after they are baked they come out extremely moist and delicious. If I hadn’t told people I’m pretty sure no one would have noticed the squash in them. Even with being a couple of tablespoons short on cocoa powder in the frosting they were still delicious. I thought I had more cocoa powder than I did and only managed to eke out about 4 tablespoons of the 6 the recipe calls for. It still seemed chocolately enough.

I’m happy to report all the squash have now been divested of with only one casualty going bad before I got to use it.