When I was a kid, my mom did the majority of the baking around the house. Occasionally my dad would fill in as short order cook when my mom didn’t feel like making dinner, or for our standard Sunday morning breakfast, but my mom.. she was the kitchen warrior.

Growing up, I had no idea how she did it.

I knew she had this Magical cookbook that she always had open when she made one of her specialties, but being a child, I had no idea what any of the words or symbols meant. I was one of those…. special children, so I always likened it to a spell book, and her wooden spoon was her magic wand. She’d throw in all these crazy things, and in the end everything ended up delicious, so long as she kept the vegetables out of the cupcakes, and kept the candy out of the vegetables.

So when I saw my mom standing over a bowl holding onto a box grater, shredding zuccneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comhini, with a giant bag of gumdrops sitting next to where the rest of her ingredients were laid out, I panicked.

Gumdrops and zucchini? Together?

And then she laid it on me..

Not only was I going to be eating this stuff that she was mixing up, but I was going to aid her in creating it. She handed me this big mixing bowl filled about halfway up with granulated white sugar, a butter knife and the giant bag of gumdrops. She sat me down at the kitchen table and demonstrated what I was supposed to do, and then went back to grating zucchini. For a moment I was awestruck, then I complied.

I cut the gumdrop into thin slices horizontally.
I rolled them in the sugar.
I cut each of those slices into for pieces.
I rolled them in the sugar.

Then I started on the next one. All the way through the entire bag, though actually, I only got about a quarter of the way through before my complaining attracted the attention of my older sister, who was snagged and dragged into duty as soon as my mom saw that she entered the kitchen.

Then my mom did something that I was sure would lead to disaster. She mixed up the zucchini shreds with sugar, egg, oil, some powders and flours and THEN SHE DUMPED IN THE GUMDROPS.
OMG it was devastating.

I think my sister and I both cringed and ‘Ewwww’d and flailed our little arms in pseudo panic. My mom was making something brown and goopy, filled with vegetables and gumdrops and WE WERE GOING TO HAVE TO EAT IT.

Cut to 30 minutes later, when out from the depths of the oven sprang forth a tray of odd lumps that we did not quite understand how to consume, as they looked like green flecked dirty cupcakes, but smelled sweet, like something we might enjoy.

I worried this might end badly, like the time my grandma told me that it would be alright for me to eat horse chestnuts from the tree in front of our church, not realizing that they are extremely poisonous. Knowing that I didn’t want to end up in the hospital with a tube up my nose getting my stomach pumped… again, I was wary.

It only took me one bite to realize that they were the most delicious and tasty muffin/cupcake/ bread that I’d ever eaten in my entire life.

The gumdrops were dispersed perfectly throughout the body of the muffin, and when sliced through, glistened in the light like stained glass windows.

My mom had to stop me from eating them, actually. It wasn’t yet dinner time, and I was already stuffing my face full of muffins. They were light and fluffy, and - Dare I say it, MOIST!

They were amazingly delicious. Magically, the zucchini itself blended in perfectly with the rest of the muffin, and they weren’t vegetable-y at all!

But now, I’m older. You’d think I’d cringe less when I thought of strange food pairings, but I don’t. I am, however, still a huge fan of my mom’s zucchini bread muffins. They’re so good they don’t even need icing. They’re so perfect, you could double the amount of zucchini, and they’d still taste like candy.

They’re also perfect housewarming gifts when baked in loaf pans, wrapped in parchment and tied with a ribbon. They freeze well (up to 6 months wrapped in saran wrap and then again in tin foil.)

And people LOVE them.
…after they’ve gotten past the description of “Zucchini bread, with… gumdrops.. in it.”

Anyways… I’m now in posession of my mom’s “spell book”. Its full of all sorts of delicious and almost fool proof recipes that I rarely see people making now a days. Old fashioned cookies, cakes, breads.. candies.

..But best of all, my mom’s zucchini bread recipe.

And in keeping with tradition, you’ll have to read the recipe card yourself. Its forbidden to be passed along any other way.

(click the photo to enlarge it and read it.)

There is a story behind the card itself, actually.

The original recipe card was written by my great grandma on my mom’s side. She was a very youthful woman, who despite having diabetes and having been instructed by doctors to not eat any candy or sugar, she insisted to all around her that it was alright, so long as she ate them IN something. However, when she wrote out her recipes, she’d often write down healthy ingredients (with “optional” next to them), but in all actuality she’d make the recipe with the “naughty” ingredients, like candy and sugar.

Hence why the recipe card calls for coconut, when what she really used was chopped gumdrops.

My grandma changed the recipe when she wrote out her version of the recipe card, by omitting the chopped nuts and the coconut, and adding an extra 1/2 cup- 1 cup of zucchini shreds and the requisite 1 cup of chopped gumdrops in its place. This is how my mom grew up making it also, and how I grew up with my mom making it, and how I now make it, myself (you can make it any way that you want, including using whole wheat flour, adding oats, using applesauce instead of oil, or just following the recipe as it is written.)

…But we keep the recipe card reading the same as it always did. Misspellings, strange instructions and all.

Its kind of part of the magic of the family cookbook.

1 part bippity, 1 part boppity, 1 part chopped gumdrops.

-A.

P.S. if you’re going to make them as muffins, be sure to grease the muffin tin or use paper liners, and bake them for 20-25 minutes at 350, or until a toothpick poked in the center comes out clean. The tops should be flat and crunchy. Use a knife to loosen the edges of the muffins from the pan (unless you used liners) as the gumdrops that are at the edge of the batter have a tendency to stick to the pan, but will come off easily if you are gentle!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 3:17 am and is filed under November 2007, The Cupcakes!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.