even without our own garden we find ourselves with a embarrassment of zucchini this time of year; we recently joined a CSA, and one week’s vegetable box yielded enough squash for a a tomato-zucchini-dill side-dish, two pasta dishes, and this weekend i retreated to the obligatory zucchini bread. this is not a chore, however — i’m always looking for an excuse to bake. two over-ripe bananas? banana bread coming up. even better if i can procrastinate something, anything, in order to bake. saturday afternoon was set aside for finishing up the blog transition; consequently, i decided i should bake and here it is 6pm and i’m finally sitting down at my desk, with a warm loaf of Procrastination Bread cooling on the kitchen counter.
so i trolled a half dozen recipes (paula deen suggest serving hers with a side of whipped cream, naturally) before deciding that i’d made up my own version. admittedly, doing something my own way without having done it correctly the first time IS how i have gone astray in the kitchen many many times. but i know my way around quickbreads pretty well.
i loosely based this on 101 cookbook’s Special Zucchini Bread Recipe, borrowing the structure more than the flavors. 101 cookbooks is great about using wheat flours. simply substituting wheat for white flour in a recipe usually yields baked goods that are crumbly and dry. the recipe needs to be built for wheat flour, and that’s beyond my baking skills as of yet. anyway, i had chocolate on the brain, but i couldn’t really justify making a cocoa-powder-laden loaf (tho, yum) and still consider it something that’s on the diet-approved list. but maybe sneaking a few chocolate chips wouldn’t count, right? its like putting chocolate into mixed nuts and calling it trail mix. in another arrangement, the same ingredients would be a snickers bar. but packaging is everything.
so, i packaged chocolate chips into a bread loaded with zucchini. or, hid zucchini in a chocolate chip muffin, thereby tricking Ben into eating one more zucchini dish this week. one of the loaf pans seems to have gone missing, so it was necessary at the last minute to bail into one loaf pan and one muffin pan, but no harm done there.
here’s the recipe, with a few tweaks added in for next time based on how these came out:
Procrastination Bread, or Chocolate Chip Orange Zucchini Bread/Muffins
1.5 cup chopped walnuts. i like pretty big chunks, so i tend to buy halves and then chop them slightly
1 cup chocolate chips or chunks (i recommend guittard for chips, or better yet, buy a scharffenberger bar and chop it into chunks)
zest of 2 oranges3 cup whole wheat pastry flour (hard to find, totally worth it. you can order it here, or, happily, Berkeley Bowl carries it in the bulk foods section)
1.5 tsp baking soda (make sure your box isn’t more than a year old — it DOES matter)
.5 tsp baking powder (ditto that for age of baking soda)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg (could try allspice in place of the nutmeg with interesting results).5 cup butter, softened
.75 cup granulated sugar
.5 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract3 cup grated zucchini (the food processor is your best friend here!)
1) toss together walnuts, orange zest and chocolate. set aside and try not to snack on too much. (think of it as a snickers bar, not trail mix).
2) mix together flour, baking soda and powder, salt and spices and set aside.
3) grate zucchini
4) cream butter with an electric mixer (or your big strong arm) till it’s fluffy. add sugar. then add eggs one at a time, and finally the vanilla. with a spatula, fold in the zucchini shreds.
5) mix in the flour mixture in several batches. don’t over mix. stir till the flour is almost but not quite incorporated. then add the chocolate/nut/orange mix and fold over a couple of times.
6) line 2 loaf pans with parchment paper (for real – once you discover parchment paper you’ll never butter/flour or pam a pan again). pour batter in and smooth the top.
7) baking 45 + minutes at 350 degrees, checking every 5 until the center is set. per 101 cookbook’s recommendation, don’t overbake, since the loaf will keep cooking for a few minutes once you pull it out. i made one loaf and a dozen cupcakes out of this recipe, since i could only find one of my loaf pans. the cupcakes took about 18 minutes. start checking them every 3 min after about 12 minutes.
8) let stand in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a rack or a dishtowel to fully cool.
9) now go back to doing whatever you were supposed to be doing before you started baking instead.