Chocolate Zucchini Bread

One of my current favorite food blogs is Gina's Weight Watchers Recipes. She takes a whole host of different recipes and posts them with nutritional information and, if you're on the Weight Watchers program, how many points her dishes are worth. It's a great site and a great resource.

I've recently received an abundance of zucchini and this was one of the recipes that I used. Very, very good - very good for breakfast.

Chocolate Zucchini Bread
Adapted from Gina's Weight Watchers Recipes

Servings: Makes 16 slices • Serving Size: 1 slice • Calories: 215 • Points: 4 pts each
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa, (I used cocoa from Penzey's Spice)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted (**see note)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (1 3/4 ounces) (I omitted)
2 cups grated zucchini (1 medium)
Baking spray

Preheat oven to 325°F. Spray two 8 1/2-by-4 1/2-inch loaf pans with cooking spray. Whisk flours, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. Whisk eggs, sugar, applesauce, oil, vanilla and melted chocolate in another large bowl until blended. Add the dry ingredients and stir with a rubber spatula until just combined. Fold in zucchini and walnuts. Pour the batter into the prepared pans.

Bake the loaves 55 to 60 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool for 10 minutes. Invert onto rack and cool completely.

A couple of notes ... **in reference to the melted unsweetened chocolate - in the future, I'm probably going to skip this step - I don't know that this really added anything to the dish and just caused one more bowl to get dirty IMHO.

Also, I made one mini loaf and a dozen cupcakes from this recipe. Like I said - this makes good breakfast food.