Not so Sneaky Spinach Cupcakes

a new way to use up a bunch of spinach

There is an entire category of cookbooks devoted to sneaking vegetables into your family’s food. I would like to let it be known, I am not the type of person to sneak vegetables into food. As a rule, I don’t trick people into eating anything they don’t want to. I might change my tune in the future (I hear toddlers can be notoriously picky), but for now, we are loud and proud vegetable eaters in my house. However, I am guilty of over purchasing produce on occasion, and sometimes recipe testing and photoshoots lead to large amounts of a single ingredient that need a home.

When I found myself with a gargantuan amount of baby spinach languishing, I decided to get creative. There is absolutely nothing sneaky about the spinach in these cupcakes. Do you see how gloriously GREEN they are? The color is achieved by quickly blanching, then blending the spinach into the wet ingredients of the cake.

These otherwise pretty straightforward vanilla cupcakes are made using the reverse creaming method, meaning that the dry ingredients are mixed with the butter, then the wet ingredients are added last to that sandy mixture. The result is a fine crumbed, soft and very tender cake that tastes like butter and vanilla and sweetness, without even a hint of spinach.

Decorate them any way you like. I’ve included a recipe for a very simple vanilla buttercream frosting, but they could take just about any flavor you throw at them. If you added a bit of crushed freeze dried strawberries or raspberries to the mix, you could make a super striking and delicious dessert.

And if you still have more spinach to use up, here’s an easy one pan dinner that makes use of quite a bit of spinach: One-Pan Crispy Chicken and Chickpeas (gift link)

I also made some spinach, date, and oat snack bars for my kiddo that were based on the ingredients from the Once Upon a Farm soft snack bars. If any one is interested, let me know and I will share my recipe! I will warn you, they are not as beautiful as these cupcakes, but they have been a great on the go snack for us, and they aren’t hard to make at all.