Vegan Chocolate Banana Zucchini Bread
I think this will be my last zucchini bread post for this season, and I made some significant changes to my other zucchini breads (check here for my Apple Zucchini Cake with Walnuts and my Chocolate Zucchini Spelt Cake).
First of all, this one is vegan. For quite some time I wanted to see, what a flax seed and water mixture does to a cake in order to replace eggs. It definitely needs more experimenting, but in this cake it works well. I must admit, it was a safe try for this substitution with all the mashed bananas on the ingredients list. Bananas are a good egg substitute too, when it comes to cake baking.
However, the bananas are helping out on another side as well: I tried to substitute the amount of sugar/agave syrup from my other zucchini bread recipes with mashed bananas. What else can I say than that I can't stop eating this cake? In fact, I had to stock up on milk (which I normally don't drink in such copious amounts) to go with a slice or two of this cake. It's yummy, it's moist, it's chocolate, and it's healthy, it's so full of good things to be any main meal of the day.
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VEGAN CHOCOLATE BANANA ZUCCHINI BREAD
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 tablespoons ground flax seeds
6 tablespoons warm water
1/3 cup agave syrup
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup mashed bananas (2 large bananas)
1 cup zucchini, grated
Yields 1 loaf
-----------------------------------------------------------------Preheat oven to 180C. Grease or line loaf tin with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, combine ground flax seeds with warm water. Let stand until it becomes like gel, about 10 minutes. I fit doesn't, pour the mixture into a small pot and let simmer for a couple of minutes.
Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder. Set aside.
When flax seed water mixture has combined, whisk in agave syrup, olive oil and mashed bananas. Combine dry ingredients with wet ingredients. Stir in the grated zucchinis.
Pour batter into prepared loaf tin. Bake for about 45 minutes or until cake tester comes out clean. Let cool in the tin for 10 minutes. Then take out and let cool completely on rack.
Zucchini bread recipes abound, but nothing quite like the looks of this. Bookmarked your site! Thanks.
This looks beautiful - I love zucchini bread! Love your photo. I hope you will submit this to http://www.FindingVegan.com ~Kathy
I will definitely try this! I made a good zucchini recipe recently, too but banana and chocolate sound like great additions.
I love that this recipe is free from refined sugar, I'll be trying this very soon!
I made this recipe this weekend and loved it! I did substitute the flaxseed for 2 eggs which worked just fine. I did muffins instead of bread and thought they were very yummy and moist. Oh and added a few chocolate chips on top to finish them off.
We love this recipe: thanks so much! We do substitute 2 eggs for the flax, coconut oil for the olive oil and honey for the agave. It's a great way to use summer produce and to sneak a few extra veggies into our two year old!
I just made this loaf and I substituted the flour for quinoa flour and the olive oil for coconut oil. I cooked it for 45 minutes and was disappointed to find it still very gooey on the inside. Looking for suggestions: Does it just need to be cooked longer or should I have altered the amounts of the substitutions? The flavour is amazing and the texture of the cooked parts is very nice.
Angela, sorry to hear that. I don't think I can give you any tips, as I haven't baked successfully with quinoa flour. I tried muffins recently (a total disaster). My impression was that quinoa flour doesn't rise the same way glutenous flours do. So it is surely more dense, but more gooey? Those muffins that I cooked took a regular 25 minutes. Not longer than other muffins.....
I doubled this recipe today and while it baked thought that maybe doubling a new recipe isn't the best idea! But it worked out well. The flavor is really great although they turned out too moist. I think next time I will cut back on some of the water and/or squeeze some water out of the zukes.
This recipe is awesome! For some reason, mine turned out a little gooey as well, but it was still delicious. Definitely would recommend this!
So I made this recipe again and this time squeezed the water out of the zucchini. It came out perfect and was not gooey like the time before. Even my dad who is not vegan and generally does not eat healthy, loved this bread. Success!