I received a huge (and I mean huge!) zucchini from my friend Nicole’s parents’ amazing garden this week, a supply that lasted me through three entire recipes, all of which you will see posted here this week!

For zucchini recipe inspiration, I turned to the one whose recipes I know never fail: my grandma. As the mother of nine, and the grandmother of close to thirty, plus a few great-grandchildren, my grandma knows how to satisfy a stomach quickly and on the cheap! And she loves to bake for us. Whenever we were expecting grandma over, we would also be expecting something delicious to eat…brownies, cake, or if we are lucky, her famous chocolate zucchini bread!

She sent me the melt-in-your-mouth recipe for this delicious bread, along with a few other zucchini dish ideas to help me use up my stock of the summer vegetable...stay tuned for Zucchini Quiche!

3 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 ¼ cups vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups grated zucchini
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
½ cup chocolate chips
1 cup walnuts, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Beat eggs in a large bowl until light. Add sugar, oil, and vanilla. Stir in zucchini. Combine with flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and cocoa. Fold in chocolate chips and walnuts.

Divide between two 8 inch loaf pans. Bake for 45-50 minutes. Use a toothpick to test if center is done. Cool on wire rack before serving.

This recipe makes two loaves of chock full of chocolate zucchini bread. However, with my cocoa-abstaining husband in mind, I decided to make one plain loaf, and one chocolate. I did this by pouring half the batter into one pan before adding half of the cocoa powder to the remaining batter. I would have gladly eaten two loaves of the double chocolate all by myself, but I thought better of it! My grandma also said that instead of using cocoa powder, you could use 2 ounces of melted semi-sweet chocolate, but she used cocoa powder because it was less expensive.

The plain loaf was delicious, and you could really taste the cinnamon in it, but unfortunately most of the chocolate chips sunk to the bottom. I think this is because I let it sit out while I was stirring the cocoa powder into the second batch. It might be a good idea to get the pans into the oven as soon as you pour the batter into the pans to prevent any sinking. I put the chocolate loaf in right away, and the chocolate chips melted perfectly throughout. If I make plain zucchini bread again, I may try adding raisins instead of chocolate chips!