Homemade Zucchini Bread

I don’t know about you, but I love to snack.  I am a snack fiend.  When I t comes to getting my calories for the day I like my meals to stay on the lighter 200-400 calorie range and so to get up to my 1800 calorie a day limit I need to snack to survive.  I have snack bars, yogurt, fruit and dried fruit and nut trail mix sitting around the house so I don’t reach for an Oreo or ten from my BF’s non-diet snack stash.  You can only eat so many Kashi TLC bars before your belly starts to crave a healthy homemade option.

I have already shown you my recipe for Banana Bread, which is one of my all-time favorite things, but I feel it is time I branched out a bit.  Because of my new-found love for zucchini I felt it was necessary for me to find a great Zucchini Bread recipe to add to my repertoires and I may have done just that.

After hours of searching the interwebs I found several different recipes that were very similar to each other, all claiming to be incredibly moist and delicious.  It took another hour of compare and contrast before I wrote down what I would use.  My recipe was slightly adapted from Sweet & Simple: The Perfect Zucchini Bread Recipe.  I suggest you check out the page because it has great tips on how to adapt this recipe for muffins, small loaves and regular loaves and has a recipe for a sweet glaze that I am not adding to my recipe.

Here is what you will need:

• 2 cups of grated zucchini, I used 1 medium/large zucchini
• 1 1/4 C all-purpose flour
• 1 1/4 C wheat flour
• 1/2 C sugar
• 1/2 C brown sugar
• pinch of nutmeg
• pinch of cloves
• 2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 tsp. kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 C butter (room temp.)
• 1/2 tsp. almond extract
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees

Grab a large bowl and sift together your dry ingredients, flours, spices, baking soda and powder, everything except your sugars.  Set this aside.

Next pull out your blender and cream together your room temperature butter and sugars until thick and smooth.

Once your butter and sugar is whipped to a super cream add your eggs, 1 at a time, blending well for each.

Now grab that bowl full of dry ingredients and very slowly add them to your wet mix.

Next, add your two cups of zucchini and blend slowly.  The zucchini will contain quite a bit of water.  If you want to you can squeeze some of the water out if you feel your mix is too liquid.  Finally, add your vanilla and almond extract and blend until just combined.  After each of these steps I like to use a rubber spatula to clean the sides of the bowl and fold the mixture to ensure an even blend.  If you want to just do this at the end that is your choice, but it may take you a few minutes to get things blended with the spatula.

Pour the mix into a greased and floured* loaf pan and bake for 50-65 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted into the center of the loaf.

*I used flour because it was noted in several of the recipes, though I am not entire sure that it was necessary so you may omit that step if you like, but you do need to grease your pan.

Let the bread rest for 10-15 minutes in the pan and then remove and transfer to wire rack to cool.

Your finished product should be super tasty.  I know mine came out wonderfully.  It has a slight nutty flavor that mixes well with the spices and is still nice and moist.  I couldn’t help but do a gratuitous close up photo of my afternoon snack.

Now on to the nutritional info.  I put the recipe into MyNetDiary calorie calculator and this is what I got for the full loaf.

• Total Calories 2853
• Fat, 101g
• Carbs 439g
• Protein 53g
• Trans Fat 0g
• Saturated Fat 59g
• Cholesterol 610mg
• Sodium 2676mg
• Net Carbs 410g
• Fiber 29g
• Sugars 203g
• Calcium 288mg

So lets say you cut yourself a large 1/12 of a loaf slice that is 238 calories, 8 grams of fat, 37 carbs, 4 grams of protein, 5 grams of saturated fat, 51mg of cholesterol, 233mg sodium, 34 net carbs, 2 grams of fiber, 17 grams of sugar and 24mg of calcium.

To make this bread healthier you could sub cold milled flax for the egg use less salt, cut out a bit of the sugar or sub in a sugar substitute and maybe a butter substitute as well.  I don’t mind eating a bit more calories as long as I know there aren’t crazy amounts of chemicals and preservatives in my food.
I will leave it to you to decide.  Let me know what you think.  Thanks for reading.