Chocolate and Cream Cheese Swirl Zucchini Bread

I'm a real sucker for a good zucchini desert!  I love zucchini bread and zucchini brownies, and have been making both for years.  Recently, I discovered what may just be my new favorite zucchini dessert!

Behold chocolate and cream cheese swirl zucchini bread!  Yep, it pretty much taste as awesome as it sounds!  What's not to love about it?  It's incredibly moist, thanks to the zucchini, plus it is chocolatey, but not too chocolatey, with the cream cheese swirling throughout, giving it a bit of richness. 

I found this recipe while looking for chocolate zucchini bread recipes to try.  This recipe one my heart because of the addition of cream cheese.  A few things about the above recipe.  It calls to make the bread in five mini loaf pans.  I found that two regular loaf pans worked great for me.  We shared one loaf over a meal with friends, and then I easily froze the second loaf for another time.  

Another thing is that after pouring my chocolate layer in the pan, adding the cream cheese layer, and then adding the second chocolate layer, I then swirled the batter together, much like I would for brownies with caramel or cream cheese swirl.  The directions did not say to do that, and I think I figured out why.  You can not see the pretty swirly marble effect of cream cheese in my loaves, and I am assuming it is because I mixed the layers too much before baking.  Perhaps next time I will just let it be and see if it makes the marble effect all on its own while baking. It tasted good either way, but was not as pretty as I would have liked.

INGREDIENTS:

Cream cheese layer:
8 oz soften cream cheese
1/4 c. sugar 
1 egg

Chocolate layers:
2 c. flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. instant ground coffee or espresso
1 tsp. salt
6 tbs. unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 c. oil
1/2 c. sour cream
1 1/2 c. sugar
4 large eggs
3 c. grated zucchini
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 c. chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and spray loaf pans with non stick spray.

In a small bowl, beat the cream cheese 1/4 c. sugar and egg with an electric mixture until smooth and set aside.  

In a medium bowl, whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, ground coffee, salt and cocoa powder together. 

In a separate bowl, mix together sugar and oil until creamed.  Add eggs one at a time until well combined.  Mix in sour cream, vanilla and zucchini.  Slowly add in dry ingredients until batter is smooth.  Stir in chocolate chips.

Pour half of the chocolate batter in the bottom of loaf pans.  Then pour the cream cheese mixture into the loaf pans evenly.  Pour the remaining chocolate batter evenly on top of the cream cheese layer.  Bake for 40 minutes (I found that I needed almost an hour of bake time using two loaf pans instead of five mini loaf pans) or until the center pokes clean. Tip:  I also placed my loaf pans on top of a cookie sheet before baking, to prevent the batter from pouring out into the oven.