Monday morning baking escapades...

Happy Monday everyone! Hopefully you all had a wonderful, relaxing weekend and are hanging in there on your first day back to work. I actually happen to be off work today and I've been keeping busy with errands, laundry, and some baking. Over the weekend I decided to make a Paula Deen recipe for chocolate chip zucchini bread. Here is the original recipe, courtesy of the Food Network website:

Ingredients

* 3 cups all-purpose flour
* 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 3 eggs
* 2 cups white sugar
* 1 cup vegetable oil
* 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 2 cups grated zucchini
* 1 cup chopped pecans
* 1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
* 1 tablespoon orange zest
* Whipped cream, for serving
* Zucchini ribbons, for serving

Directions

Preheat oven at 350 degrees F. Grease (2) 9 by 5-inch loaf pans.

Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, spices and baking soda.

In a large bowl, beat eggs until light and fluffy. Add sugar, and continue beating until well blended. Stir in oil, vanilla, zucchini, pecans, chocolate chips, and orange zest. Stir in sifted ingredients. Pour into prepared loaf pans.

Bake for 50 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove loaves from pans and cool. Chill before slicing. Serve with whipped cream and ribbons of zucchini.

This recipe makes two loaves, but I only have one loaf pan, so I halved the recipe and scaled back the cooking time to 45 minutes. I also left out the nuts (Adam and I don't like them in breads/brownies/cookies/etc.) and substituted a little bit of lemon juice (about 1/2 tbsp) for the orange zest since I didn't have an orange. This loaf turned out well enough, but it was a bit dry, so I decided to make another loaf today and play with the recipe a little. In addition to the substitutions I made for the first loaf, I used half the amount of oil and added 1/4 c. of no sugar added applesauce. I also put in the full 2 cups of zucchini rather than halving the recipe, since the first loaf tasted more like chocolate than zucchini, which isn't necessarily a BAD thing, but this is supposed to be zucchini bread. I figured since I originally left out the cup of chopped pecans, an extra cup of zucchini wouldn't change the overall density of the bread. I also cut the bake time back to 40 minutes this time, which is the shortest time it took for me to insert a knife and have it come out clean. This is the end result:



I haven't tasted it yet since it's still cooling, but I'm fully anticipating this being a 4 or 5 star recipe. I served the first loaf at night with some fat free cool whip and again in the morning with some fat free cream cheese. I think this would also taste great warm with a little pat of butter. Mmm mmm!

Originally it was supposed to rain today and we didn't want to plan on grilling out, so we're having an easy taco dinner tonight with turkey and low-carb tortillas. If the sun stays out, I'm hoping to talk Adam into resuming our post-dinner walks, and maybe if I'm good, I'll treat myself to a slice of zucchini bread. :)