Zucchini Overflow?

Good harvest of zucchini lately? Gotten a bunch from people who have been harvesting them? An explanation for the overflow might be from wiseGEEK's "What is zucchini?" site. "Many markets carry this squash in the summer, and it is also a snap to grow at home, although some caution is advised, as the plants can produce way more fruit than one would think is physically possible."

A few times this month, a co-worker brought some gargantuan ones, and I've gleefully partaken of them, and passed on buying any in the store for awhile. I've grated or sliced these homegrown ones for recipes, or bagging and freezing after shredding and slicing, As of a week ago, I've baked two half batches of zucchini mini-muffins, varied by well shapes, and one batch of crustless ham-swiss-zucchini quiche.

For the next few articles, I'll publish three recipes for zucchini mini-muffins and one for the quiche.
The two half-batches of mini-muffins I baked last week had the same ingredients and baking time. The pans differed—aluminum round vs. silicone square—because I wanted to test my theory that one type of pan would yield moister results than the other pan.

My third batch of mini-muffins will again use the same ingredients, but the amount will be a 3/4-recipe batch, using both types of pans. I'll be using zucchini that I grated, froze, bagged, then let thaw. I'll not squeeze, as thawed zucchini is watery when squeezed.

I consider mini-muffin sizes to be a bit more appealing than regular cupcake size—more units that are available for distributing in a social environment. The amount of batter for making one cupcake-sized goodie is the same amount as for three mini-muffins. (At a potluck event, people can more easily pick up a small, self-contained morsel than commit to a larger item or something that requires slicing, particularly a pie.)

The Betty Crocker recipe has lots of details, including baking times for various pans. The Paula Deen recipe includes nutmeg, a spice I'd like to use in more recipes than I do. The most appealing reason I like these two 2-loaf recipes, besides relative ease of the process, is the even number of eggs. Making half-recipes is a lot easier when dividing four eggs than three eggs.

Some additional zucchini links:

• Zucchini History
• Vegetable Dictionary - Zucchini
• Zucchini nutrition facts
• My veggie pasta recipe, which calls for zucchini as one of the four veggies. (Other veggies are celery, carrots, and yellow squash--all 1/2-pounds each, and Salad-Shooter sliced.)

Fudge Offload: Silicone Vs. Aluminum Pans

In December, I spotted a post about fudge in The Blog Promoter LinkedIn group called Mama's Fudge Recipe, by Emily Powell. Fudge! Had to visit the site, as I myself make EZ minimal-ingredients fudge, such as "A Convenient Fudge" and "4-ingredient Raspberry Chocolate Fudge". Minimal ingredients are meltable candy, marshmallows, and frosting.

Emily's recipe contrasted with my recipes for list of ingredients and process. One of her pan preparation instructions that caught my eye was her use of Pam and flour, typically for a dessert to be baked. I asked her about it. She confirmed that the flour was raw. I am adverse to eating or serving raw flour, and wondered about dusting with powdered sugar instead of flour.for something that didn't need baking.

For my latest batch of EZ fudge, I tried spray oil and powdered sugar for two kinds of pans—a silicon rubber pan (24 square cavities) and aluminum pan (12 round cavities). Each square holds 5 teaspoons of filling; Each round (cup shape) holds 4 teaspoons. Natch, if you use these pans for cakes or muffins, pour only about a rounded tablespoon of batter to allow for expansion during the baking process. Some baking pans info:

• 24 (square) cavities silicone pan
• 12 (round) cavities aluminum pan (stamped single-piece)
• 24 (round) cavities aluminum pan (constructed w/cups attached to pan)

The pixstrip shows ingredients and pans, fudge mixture squeegeed into pans, ejected fudge pieces, and fudge pieces in paper liners in a box.

After I poured the fudge mixture into the prepared pans and cooling it in the refrigerator, I didn't get around to ejecting them until about four hours later. (Cooling time should have been about an hour or so.) The 3rd-panel pixstrip shows easy-out results with using the silicone pan, not so much with the aluminum pan. The plateful also shows nice shapes from the squares, but lots of misshapes and broken pieces from the rounds. Extraction from the silicone pan was not bad. I turned the pan upside down and pressed from the back. As for the aluminum pan, using the butter knife blade sometimes popped the shapes out ok, but most, not.

In the past, I've poured the fudge mixture into a spray-oiled 8 x 8 glass pan. After a couple of hours, I'd used a paring knife to cut it into 64 pieces. That task took some patience, as the mixture became dense. I'm not great at cutting consistent cubes, either.

I've concluded that using silicone pans for fudge—after prepping with spray oil and powdered sugar—provides good results. BTW, the fudge batch makes about 1 1/2 silicon pans worth (36 squares). The shapes fit very nicely into mini-cupcake paper liners for neatness, as the pixstrip shows in the last pixstrip panel.

Because the fudge squares fit so well in mini-cupcake papers, a future experiment will be baking mini-cupcakes in silicon pans that I prep with only spray oil instead of lining with papers, then seeing how well they fit each other after baking. I might need to underfill the squares with batter so the baked shapes don't bulge and fit the papers badly. (Typical mini-cupcake recipe calls for a rounded teaspoonful of batter.)

Related articles:

• Waits N Measures, Baking Pans N Papers (#87)
• Square Mini and Whoopie Muffin Experiment (#88)
• Lemon Poppyseed Mini-cupcakes (#70)
• Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Mini-muffins (#79)