Banana Bread Cookies

While banana bread is tasty, it sometimes isn't the best for serving because you have to slice it. To solve this, I designed a recipe that combined the great taste of banana bread in a cookie style that everyone loves. The result is cookies that are crisp on the edges like regular cookies, but have a middle that is the classic banana bread consistency.

Ingredients:

Don't worry, the batter is
supposed to be gloopy.

½ cup of softened unsalted butter

1 cup of sugar

1 egg

2 large bananas

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 cups of flour

¼ teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

¼ teaspoon nutmeg

½ cup sweetened coconut flakes

½ cup semi sweet chocolate chips

½ cup of pecans

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350°F and grease two cookie sheets.

Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the egg and continue to beat until well combined. Mash the bananas in a separate bowl and add them to your butter/sugar mixture. In another bowl, Mix together the flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, and nutmeg and slowly add it to the butter and banana mixture and mix until just combined. Add in the coconut flakes and finally fold in the pecans and chocolate chips.

Drop in spoonfuls of the batter onto parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

Bake for 10-12 minutes or until nicely golden brown. Let cool on wire racks.

In order to make these healthier, you could replace some of the white flour with white whole wheat flour and still get great cookies.

Whole Wheat Banana Bread & Muffins

So Dad wasn’t very happy with me the other day (not like I did anything wrong- jk love you daddy if you’re reading this!). To make him happy I decided to make his favorite whole what banana bread. He’s not big into cookies and cupcakes, but he loves his banana bread recipe because there is enough sweetness while it’s still decently healthy. The recipe is actually from my grandmother who’s a health nut in Florida, so thanks Nona!

I actually doubled the recipe this time and used half of the batter for bread, and half for muffins

Recipe:

Ingredients:

2 eggs

1 cup sugar

½ cup butter

½ cup sour cream

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon nutmeg

1 cup (basically 2 whole) bananas

1 2/3 cups whole wheat pastry flour

½ cup pecans

 

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 F.

In a large bowl, beat eggs sugar and butter together and mix well. Stir in bananas, sour cream, and vanilla. Stir in flour, nutmeg, baking soda and salt. Chop pecans and then add them to the batter and blend them in.

Grease and flour either a 9x5x3 inch loaf pan or muffin tine. Fill the loaf pan with all the batter or fill the individual muffin cups ¾ of the way full.

If making a regular loaf, bake the bread for 60 minutes or bake the muffins until an inserted toothpick comes in clean (you will obviously need to bake larger muffins for more time, I needed to bake mine for about 15 minutes). If you are making muffins, make sure that you fill cups that are not filled with batter with water in order to prevent the cups from burning.

Remove from oven and let cool before slicing.

I slid a knife around the edges to make it easier to take out
the muffins from the tin.