Spelt Zucchini Bread with Warm Spices, Walnuts & Chocolate

Spelt zucchini bread with warm spices, walnuts, and chocolate is a delicious way to eat your vegetables. Naturally sweetened and vegan!

It’s another zucchini recipe for you this week! I know that this one isn’t terribly original, but I mostly just wanted a record of this spelt zucchini bread recipe here for myself. We’re still swimming in zucchini over here and our plants show no signs of stopping. Once I get tired of it in salads, rolled into vegan involtini, simply seasoned on the grill, and in this loaf, I’m going to grate and freeze it as I learned in this video from Megan Gilger. So simple! Sometimes I steam slices of it and freeze the slices for smoothies. The zucchini adds body to a smoothie without an overpowering flavour–good way to sneak in vegetables :)

This spelt zucchini bread has a lot of warm spices, toasty walnuts, and chocolate chunks (of course!). I love it when I get to eat my vegetables with chocolate. As I often do with my recipes, I chose light spelt as the base of this loaf. Whole spelt and light spelt flour are the default flours of choice in our house, but I provide some suggestions for substituting in the notes of the recipe below :)

My partner, the dogs and I are still up in cottage country this week. Lots of hanging out by the lake, reading, playing cribbage, and cooking simple seasonal food. It’s been nice and interesting to have nothing of real urgency to do. I can be a busy body, so it has been slightly challenging haha. Mark laughs at me because I follow a rigid schedule even when we go on vacation and the scheduled items in question are leisure activities. I am working to undo this constant compulsion towards productivity. I know that it is healthy and necessary to just be sometimes (a lot of the times!) :)

Wishing you well and sending my best this week. 

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5 from 5 votes

Vegan Spelt Zucchini Bread with Warm Spices, Walnuts & Chocolate

Spelt zucchini bread with warm spices, walnuts, and chocolate is the most delicious way to eat your vegetables. Naturally sweetened and vegan!

PREP TIME20 mins

COOK TIME1 hr 5 mins

TOTAL TIME1 hr 25 mins

Course Breakfast, Dessert

Diet Gluten Free, Vegan, Vegetarian

Servings: 1 9×5 loaf

Author: Laura Wright

Equipment

• 8×4 loaf pan

Ingredients

• 1 ¼ cups shredded zucchini (from roughly 1 medium zucchini)
• 1 ½ cups light spelt flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon fine sea salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
• ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• ¾ cup coconut palm sugar
• ¾ cup unsweetened apple sauce
• ⅓ cup neutral-tasting oil of choice (avocado, sunflower, refined coconut etc)
• 1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
• ½ cup walnut halves, chopped
• ½ cup dairy-free chocolate chunks or chips

Instructions

• Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a 8×4 loaf pan and then line it with parchment paper. Lightly grease the parchment as well and set aside.
• Gather the shredded zucchini in a clean kitchen towel. Over the sink, gather up the edges of the towel and squeeze out as much moisture/water from the zucchini as you can. Set aside.
• In a large bowl, whisk together the spelt flour, baking powder, baking soda, sea salt, cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg.
• In a medium bow, whisk together the coconut palm sugar, apple sauce, oil, and vanilla extract. Add this wet mixture to the larger bowl with the flour mixture. Using a rubber spatula, mix until just combined with a few little streaks of flour.
• Add the shredded and wrung out zucchini to the batter along with the walnuts and chocolate chunks. Fold these items in until they are evenly distributed.
• Transfer the batter to the prepared loaf pan and flatten the top of the loaf. Bang the filled loaf tin on the counter a few times to fully settle the batter.
• Bake the vegan spelt zucchini bread for 60-70 minutes, or until a toothpick/paring knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove the zucchini bread from the oven and let it cool in the loaf pan on a wire rack.
• Let the zucchini bread cool completely before removing from the pan and slicing.

Notes

• You could easily substitute the following flours 1-to-1 for the light spelt: whole wheat pastry flour, whole kamut flour, whole wheat flour or whole grain spelt flour (being mindful of the fact that whole grain flours will make the loaf more dense), all purpose flour, and gluten-free all purpose flour (King Arthur makes a great one).
• My favourite light spelt flour is this one from Flourist.
• You can substitute the coconut palm sugar with regular cane sugar or brown sugar here. I don’t think maple syrup or agave nectar is a great idea as we really need the structure from a granulated sweetener. Since we have a lot of wet components in this loaf (apple sauce and the zucchini), the granulated sweetener helps us avoid a gummy texture.