Zucchini bread

It's summertime, and that means lots of zucchinis. I've been pretty lucky with my batch of zuke seeds. The plants are huge and the fruits are equally enormous. Even the cold San Francisco weather can't stunt their growth. I picked a few this morning (see above) and decided I wanted to try and make zucchini bread, something I've never made before. As always, I consulted allrecipes.com and found a good recipe.

Here is the original recipe, with my changes afterwards:

INGREDIENTS

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2 1/4 cups white sugar
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups grated zucchini
1 cup chopped walnuts


DIRECTIONS

1. Grease and flour two 8 x 4 inch pans. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).

2. Sift flour, salt, baking powder, soda, and cinnamon together in a bowl.

3. Beat eggs, oil, vanilla, and sugar together in a large bowl. Add sifted ingredients to the creamed mixture, and beat well. Stir in zucchini and nuts until well combined. Pour batter into prepared pans.

4. Bake for 40 to 60 minutes, or until tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in pan on rack for 20 minutes. Remove bread from pan, and completely cool.

From the above recipe, I substituted 1 1/4 cup of brown sugar for the white sugar. I think the flavor's much better than white sugar when baking. I left out the walnuts since I didn't have any. Instead of 2 cups of grated zucchini, I put in about 3 1/2 cups (I like moist bread and that was how much two of my zucchinis yielded). If you'd rather have dry, disgusting bread, go ahead and reduce the amount of zucchini. Also, for some stupid reason, I only have one loaf pan, so I filled it up with the batter and then put the remaining batter into a muffin tin.

See how the muffins are in cupcake cups? Yeah, don't do that. I instinctively lined the muffin pan before pouring the batter in. No need for that, just make sure it's well-greased so the muffins will pop right out.