These homemade soft and chewy chocolate chip zucchini bars are great for a healthy dessert or snack.
There’s NO oil required for these chocolate chip zucchini bars ♥
It’s a safe bet that if you invite me over, I won’t show up empty-handed.
The reality of being someone who makes desserts for a living is that I always have way too much food in my apartment, and there’s no possible way I can eat it all by myself (although I do a pretty good job!).
On Saturday morning, I made four batches of these chocolate chip zucchini bars, playing around with the ingredients until I came up with the perfected recipe that yielded bars with a deliciously soft and gooey blondie texture.
Leftover Zucchini? Make Chocolate Zucchini Bread
The zucchini adds moisture to the recipe, enabling one to cut back on the fat without sacrificing flavor.
With batches of zucchini bars now threatening to take over my kitchen, I was happy for an excuse to carefully package them and take some with me to a Halloween party.
Using up leftovers + finding a large group of taste testers for my recipe free of charge + making people happy with a homemade dessert = win win win.
This year I went as a biker chick, complete with a faux leather jacket, spikey stilettos that I grew to abhor as the night progressed, and an adorable chick hat handmade by a sweet lady on Etsy.
(And now I am just a little obsessed with Etsy…)
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays because it involves three of my favorite things: puns, costumes, and eating copious amounts of chocolate.
Not that I don’t already do that last one every other day of the year…
Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bars
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup finely shredded zucchini (I used a food processor) (120g)
- 1 cup almond butter or allergy-friendly sub
- 1 tsp pure vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup + 2 tbsp flour (I had success with spelt, white, sorghum, almond, and ww pastry)
- 2/3 cup granulated sugar of choice or xylitol
- 1/4 cup or more chocolate chips
InstructionsÂ
- Zucchini Bars Recipe: Preheat the oven to 350 F. Grease an 8-inch square baking pan and set aside. In a medium bowl, gently heat the nut butter if it is not already stir-able, then stir in the zucchini and vanilla. Set aside. In a separate mixing bowl, stir together the flour, salt, baking soda, sugar of choice, and chocolate chips. Pour dry ingredients into wet and keep stirring—it may seem dry at first, so be sure to break up the nut butter and stop occasionally to scrape it off your spoon. It will eventually get gooey like cookie dough. Transfer the batter into the pan, and smooth down evenly. Press chocolate chips into the top if desired. Bake for 10 minutes. When you take the bars out, the top will look set but underneath they will still be quite undercooked. This is good! Leave the bars to cool for at least 20 minutes, and they will firm up during this time. They taste even sweeter the next day!View Nutrition Facts
Notes
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Ooh these look so rich and perfect! I love your Halloween costume, and I agree; Etsy is quite addicting!
You had me at soft & gooey. These look perfect and I love the limited ingredients in this recipe too.
Zucchini and peanut butter?! Sounds crazy, but I bet it totally works!
I love the zucchini element to these babies!
Yummy! And great costume!
I’ve never baked with zucchini before- can you taste it in the finished bars? Thanks!
PS: Katie you should make granola! I bet I know what your first flavour would be XD
You can’t… it’s like carrot cake in the way you don’t taste any veggies. Just dessert!
Sweet! Totally making this soon! <3
Took my 2 kids trick or treating and carved a pumpkin. I had good intentions of dressing up with them and making it a family ordeal – but I had all I could do with getting them dressed up 🙂
Definitely gonna make these !! Thank you 🙂
How do I add the picture to my post?
Google “how to avatar wordpress” 🙂
Just google “how to make an avatar web” and many helpful tutorial links will pop up. Good luck!
I’ve had zucchini chocolate chip muffins before, but not bars! Definitely making these 🙂
These look awesome! I need to use zucchini more often and this looks like a delicious way to do just that!
what kind of PB do you use?
I like Whole Foods 365 crunchy.
I’m not gonna lie, I’m “goth” metalhead, and to me you look like an emo middleschooler! Ha! At least that’s what middle school around here looked like.
This year, I had a fever but wanted to sit outside and watch the wee ones in their costumes. UNFORTUNATELY Chicago was hit with high wind warnings and it was literally hailing every 15 minutes. So, I just ate on Halloween paper plates for dinner from the dollar store as my “celebrating”. So lame!
Rude much, Eva?
I don’t remember saying it was a bad thing, actually. It’s Halloween and that’s what I interpreted her costume to be; so what? It brings me back in time to my days of middle school! Back to the last years of my trick-or-treating! YEESH.
Hey Katie! These look delicious! Love your costume too. I went as a doctor this year! It was thrown together last minute, but I popped the lenses out of some really big, goofy reading glasses and added a fake fuzzy mustache so it looked pretty funny! I’m so glad to hear you shop on Etsy, I love it too because I love to support handmade art! I dont want to go advertising on your site but I got excited when you mentioned Etsy, I wanted to show you my own Etsy shop because it’s kind of related to your site – except instead of your passion for making edible food, my passion is making tiny (non-edible!) food! This is mine:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/livvylee
Also, have you seen the handmade insulated cloth food baggies that zip up? You can wash them and reuse them instead of wasting the disposable plastic baggies. Those are definitely my next Etsy purchase because they’re so cute!
Olivia
You are BRILLIANT! I made them today because I had bought zucchini because it looked good at the store but I had no idea what to do with it. And then I came on your blog and saw this recipe and it was like it was meant to be!
And they came out just as good as I imagined. They are gooey and SO good. I followed the recipe to a to except using almond butter. ❤️❤️
Oh and I used coconut sugar for my sugar of choice.
Perfect healthy zucchini bread, yum:)