Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread {Gluten Free & Vegan}

Slightly spicy and mildly sweet, this vegan zucchini bread is a great way to use up extra zucchini.

I don’t know about you, but our freezer is sort of a black hole.  I’m not exactly sure how it happens, but something will be placed in there, and get sucked into the void that is our freezer.  It sits quietly in the back until one day the entire contents of the freezer explode into an avalanche of mildly frost-bitten foodstuffs.  An over-sized bag with a lone fish stick, a pint of ice cream with a mere spoonful left, something brown and unidentifiable that causes Brendan and I to look at each other with raised eyebrows and a hint of concern…  Anyway, during my freezer’s latest purge I discovered a bag of shredded zucchini remaining from last summer’s CSA haul.  And since our CSA is due to start up again any time now I figured it was probably a good idea to use up the last of the remaining goodies from 2014.

Make sure you wring the extra moisture out of your zucchini and bake it long enough to prevent it from being too soggy and collapsing in on itself.

As I said, the last of those goodies was a bag of shredded zucchini.  Each year, we end up with these baseball bat sized squashes, and while I love to eat zucchini, there’s only so many days in a row that I can have that as an accompaniment to dinner.  And since I don’t have a spiralizer to make zoodles, my go-to way to use up the squash before it goes bad is bread.  When I first made zucchini bread, Brendan was pretty ambivalent.  He loves bread of course, and had slowly come around on zucchini, but the notion of combining the two was just a little bit much for him.  And then he tasted it.

This zucchini bread is absolutely delicious.  The cinnamon compliments the zucchini in an unexpected way, and the chocolate chips add a bit of tasty indulgence to the otherwise healthful snack.  I love to eat it toasted so the chocolate pieces get good and gooey, but it’s just as addictive at room temperature.  Of course, you could omit the chocolate, but really why would you want to do that?

Anyway, if you’re like me and have a bag of zucchini somewhere in the recesses of your freezer this is a perfect way to use it up.  If not, pin this recipe and get ready for some deliciousness when you have squash out the wazoo this summer!

Zucchini Chocolate Chip Bread

Ingredients

We love this zucchini bread for breakfast. And in the afternoon. And as a late night snack. Seriously, it’s delicious!

• ¾ cup almond milk
• 2 flax eggs (2 tbsp flaxseed, dissolved in 6 tbsp warm water)
• ¼ cup white sugar
• ¼ cup brown sugar
• 1/3 c unsweetened applesauce
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 cups shredded zucchini
• 1 ¾ c gf flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ c chocolate chips (vegan, if desired)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350; spray a loaf pan with cooking spray.
2. Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt.
3. In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together eggs and sugar. Add in milk and vanilla extract until well combined. Stir in applesauce and shredded zucchini.
4. Slowly add in dry ingredients until just combined. Stir in chocolate chips.
5. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake for 45 minutes – 1 hour, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
6. Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then flip onto cooling rack. Wait at least an hour before slicing.

With chocolate and cinnamon, this vegan zucchini bread is simple and delicious without being overly sweet! Gluten free and vegan, on Quinoa and Cookies