You definitely can taste garam masala in these muffins, and the zucchini makes them moist. One minor point which you can take or leave. It makes more sense to me to mix in the cocoa powder with the dry ingredients rather than with the wet ones. It's very hard to incorporate into the egg-applesauce-sugar mixture, as the cocoa tends to float on the top. These definitely are cocoa flavored muffins, so if I make again, I think I'll use all peanut butter chips rather than milk chocolate-peanut butter chips. Personally, I liked the peanut butter flavor better, perhaps it's just a taste preference. I cut the zucchini lengthwise into quarters and used the fine shredding blade on the food processor (a lot easier than grating by hand 2 cups of zucchini), and it worked great. Doubt that I'd make these too often, but it was a nice change for a muffin.

My husband and youngest son couldn't get enough of these cake like muffins. While the batter didn't taste great, they baked up well. I didn't have garam masala, so I approximated a spice mixture of: 2 parts ginger, 1 pt cinnamon, 2 pts black pepper, 3 pts ground cumin, 3 pts ground coriander, 1/2 pts ground nutmeg, & 1 pt ground cloves.

I needed to use up some extra zucchini and this was the perfect choice. I used a little less sugar and cocoa powder and a bit more garam masala and they were a huge hit at work.

Made these today, makes almost 3 dozen and they smelled great. They don't need even 20 minutes to bake, first batch I did 20 minutes and it was a touch too long. Would use this again.