Chocolate eggplant muffins (or cake, with frosting!)

My current aspirational kitchen stuff website is Food52, and recently while trying to figure out what to do with my profusion of CSA eggplant, they posted a chocolate eggplant cake recipe. As you might know, you can use applesauce and similar "wet" purees of fruits and veggies for moisture in some baked goods, and in this case someone pureed steamed eggplant to achieve the same effect. It was easy to convert the recipe to something keto-friendly since it already mostly used almond flour; I changed out the sweetener and chocolate, swapped two of the three eggs for flax eggs, and added some KetoCuisine baking mix to increase it a little more.

On their own, the chocolate "muffins" are relatively low compared to M's ratio (around 1.3:1), but make them into "chocolate cupcakes" by adding some buttercream frosting and it was easy to get it to 2.5:1. I now keep some frozen, frosted, in individual containers so that if we have to attend a birthday party or other cake-containing event, we have an easy way to let M be part of the crowd.

Ingredients

Chocolate Cake

325g eggplant, raw, skinned and chopped into 1" cubes

20g Dutch cocoa powder

135g Lily's original dark chocolate bar

25g macadamia nut flour

10g coconut flour

4.5g wheat flour (this adds carbs, yes, but also helps bind things nicely. You could replace this with a nut flour and add some additional binding agent, like xantham gum, if desired)

30g KetoCuisine baking mix

3g psyllium husk powder

8g baking powder

45g egg, mixed well

15g flaxseed meal, mixed with 5T water and allowed to sit before adding

25g unsalted roasted macadamia nuts, ground in a food processor

Several drops of liquid sweetener, to taste

This will make 12 cupcakes; on their own, I serve each one with a syringe of 8.5g oil to get it up to a 2.5:1 ratio around 200 calories total. Or, you can use frosting in place of the oil, as below.

Frosting for the batch (to bring each cupcake to a 2.5:1 ratio)

30g 40% cream

220g European butter (two sticks), softened

93g Swerve confectioner's sweetener

Heat oven to 350 deg F. Line a muffin tin with cupcake liners.

Steam the eggplant cubes until very tender (around 20 min). Combine hot eggplant and dark chocolate in a blender and puree until smooth. Transfer to large bowl and allow to cool while you work on the rest of the batter.

Whisk together the sweetener, cocoa powder, baking powder, Ketocuisine, flours, ground macadamia nuts, pysllium husk, and 3/4 tsp salt into the eggplant/chocolate mixture until well combined. Add the egg and flax eggs and whisk until smooth.

Pour the batter into cupcake liners, about half full. Bake for about 15 minutes until a toothpick comes out mostly clean.

Allow to cool, then serve, or frost with buttercream frosting.

For the frosting:

Whip together the butter and cream until fluffy, then add Swerve. Divide frosting evenly among cupcakes.

(Note that you could also calculate plain whipped cream to top these with, if preferred)