Zucchini Pear Quick Bread

This recipe makes two proper large loaf pans of bread plus one small round cake pan.

The small round cake pan comes out first and is usually devoured by the time the larger loaves come out.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Oil and flour your pans and add parchment paper liners if you like them.

We started off making this recipe for Mom's Zucchini Bread but doubled and altered it to suit our tastes.

Ingredients:

Dry ingredients:

5 3/4 cups of white flour

3 tbsp ground flax seed

2 tsp salt

2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

6 tsp cinnamon

2 cups of chopped pecans or walnuts

Wet ingredients:

6 eggs

2 cups of veg oil

4 cups white sugar

1/2 cup of brown sugar

4 tsp pure vanilla extract (or the scrapings from one large vanilla bean)

3 1/2 cups of grated zucchini

1 cup of grated fresh unpeeled washed pears

1/2 cup of chopped apricots

For topping:

1/3 cup of unsalted, shelled pumpkin seeds

I mixed all the wet ingredients together in a bowl. Sometimes I add substitute carrot or apple. Sometimes we add raisins or currants... It depends on what we happen to have a heap of. 

I mix the dry ingredients up in a separate bowl. I use walnuts or pecans, but you could use any nut you happen to have. I've also added bran to this recipe along with the flax seed. Remember to reduce the flour if you increase the flax or add bran. I figure I can always add more flour at the end of I need it.

I butter and flour the loaf pans and add a sheet of parchment paper that overlaps the sides of the pan to make taking the loaf out easier.

I mix the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Make sure you are using a super big bowl. This is a heap of batter! Just mix until the ingredients are blended. Some lumps are ok, you don't want to over mix!

Pour the batter in the bread pans and put the left over batter in a smaller pan. Now is the time to sprinkle the loaves with seeds or toppings. I bake all three together but take the smaller pan out after about 30 minutes or when a knife comes out clean. The larger loaves will bake from 45 minutes to an hour. Use the clean knife trick here too.

Here are two loaves without seed topping.....

And here are two loaves with the pumpkin seed topping.

They are both delicious.

Hope you try your own version.

We can't seem to keep this in the house. It gets eaten almost as fast as I can bake it.