Oregon Transplant: Mini Chocolate Chip Zucchini Loaves

Happy Friday! We've almost made it to the weekend. Almost. In the meantime, wouldn't a slice of these mini cakes totally be the best way to start out your next lazy couple of days off? Methinks so :)

These are not your garden-variety zucchini cakes. You know the ones I'm talking about- dry. Crumbly. Bland. These mini loaves are none of those things. Quite the opposite, in fact. Moist? Check. Delicious? Check. Chocolatey? Heck yeah, check! It's just in my nature to add chocolate chips to everything, however the hubby's aunt told me she'd never had zucchini bread with chocolate chips before. And she loved it. I was also told by my sister-in-law that my youngest nephew loved the bread as well, although she had to tell him it was "chocolate chip bread". 4 year olds don't want to hear their beloved baked goods contain a shocking amount of green vegetable. Go figure.

I found adorable little loaf pans on clearance a while ago, and I've been dying to test them since then. I'm glad I found an excuse to finally break them out! If you don't want to make mini loaves, the amount of batter should produce one good-size loaf of zucchini bread. The hubby's family loved receiving the little loaves, they were the perfect size to deliver to people. Enough cake to satisfy a sweet tooth, not so much cake that one would feel the need to leap on the treadmill post-consumption.

In fact, there's quite a bit of zucchini in the recipe. 2 cups! I definitely put a heaping 2 cups in my loaves. I love seeing all the green studded throughout the bread. I'm so excited to start getting zucchinis out of the garden. I have so many recipe ideas for my zucchinis- cookies, stuffed, maybe a soup... The creative juices have been flowing!

Until then, there's plenty of zucchini flooding the farmer's markets right now. It makes my heart happy.

I'm a little flabbergasted we're already back to another weekend. It was a whirlwind of a week, an absolute blur. I didn't have time to prepare any recipes for next week's posts, so you can guess what one of my activities this weekend will be. Cooking. Picture-taking. Picture-editing. Uploading. It's quite the process. The hubby and I found out last weekend that my brother is coming for another visit next month (yay!) so we've been working on some projects around the house. I'm incredibly excited to unveil our latest project, but I'm going to wait till it's finished to do a home decor post. Or at least wait until it's almost finished. Right now it's in pieces on the floor, but soon- Soon it will take life into some wonderful. Y'all will just have to keep guessing till it's time. Hehe :)

Have a great (and SAFE) weekend everyone!

Ingredients (makes 4 loaves):

3 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp baking soda

4 eggs, room temp

2 cups zucchini, shredded

3/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 cup canola oil (you can substitute applesauce here!)

2 tsp molasses

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350º. Lightly coat 4 mini loaf pans with cooking spray. Set aside.

2. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour through baking soda. Whisk to combine.

3. In a separate bowl, combine eggs through vanilla extract. Whisk to combine.

4. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Fold in using a spatula. Mix until just moistened, do not over mix. Add chocolate chips to bowl, fold in with spatula.

5. Distribute batter among loaf pans. Bake in preheated oven 35-40 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Allow to cool in pans for 20 minutes, then turn loaves out to a cooling rack. Cool completely before storage.

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