Make this chocolate pecan zucchini bread recipe when you have two much zucchini on hand and don’t know what to do with it. This recipe makes two loaves of rich, nutty, chocolate quick bread that freezes well.
Chocolate Pecan Zucchini Bread Recipe
My first taste of zucchini bread was on a day I will never forget: Princess Diana’s wedding to Prince Charles. I was in grade school and we had tons of zucchini the size of baseballs in the garden. My older sister, Ann, made loaves of zucchini walnut bread.
We sat in our nightgowns in the darkened living room on that sweltering July morning, up at 4 a.m. to watch the beautiful Lady Diana Spencer marry Prince Charles. We kept the television sound low so as not to wake our parents.
And the snack for that famous morning?
Zucchini bread, of course.
I’ve transformed my sister’s basic recipe into an outstanding chocolate pecan zucchini bread recipe that’s moist, tender, and oh-so-chocotately. This is a great zucchini bread recipe for kids who hate vegetables – and grown-ups who swear they won’t touch zucchini.
The secret? Buy fresh powdered cocoa and use only good unsweetened powdered cocoa. I’ve used Hershey’s in this recipe and it is my favorite by far but Ghiardelli powdered cocoa is also excellent.
Another tip: Buy crushed pecans or chopped pecans. This saves a lot of time during the recipe preparation.
Lastly, a food processor is essential to shredding zucchini quickly, but if you don’t own a food processor, an old-fashioned box grater works just fine. My sister made that long-ago zucchini bread recipe with my mom’s 1950s box grater. I used my Cuisinart Food Processor for this recipe, but the results are the same: tender, moist zucchini bread that uses up some of the garden’s bounty at this time of year!
Chocolate Pecan Zucchini Bread recipe
Ingredients
- 3 eggs Eggs
- 1 cup Vegetable Oil
- 2 cups Sugar
- 1 tablespoon Vanilla Extract
- 2 cups Peeled, Shredded Zucchini
- 2 1/2 cups All-Purpose Flour
- 1/2 cup Powdered Unsweetened Cocoa
- 1 teaspoon Salt
- 1 teaspoon Baking Soda
- 1 teaspoon Ground Cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon Baking Powder
- 1/2 cup Chopped Pecans
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease the bottom and sides of two glass loaf pans.
- In a mixing bowl, mix the dry ingredients – flour, cocoa, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, baking powder, pecans. Set aside.
- Cut off the ends of the zucchini and peel it. Shred using a food processor or a box grader. Set side.
- In a separate bowl, beat the eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla together. Using a slotted spoon, fold in the zucchini by hand.
- Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients. Mix by hand.
- Pour evenly into each baking pan. Bake in preheated oven for 60 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.
- Remove from the oven and let cool. Use a knife to gently release the bread from the pan.
Notes
More Quick Bread Recipes
Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.
