Banana Bread Cookies

After (another) cold day of shoveling snow, all I want to do is drink hot chocolate and eat something warm that I've baked.  Today, these banana bread cookies did the trick- quick and easy to make, healthy, and most importantly, delicious.

These cookies also solved my issue of the Plight of the Single Banana.  (Spoiler alert- if you could care less about my neurotic rantings on bananas, skip this paragraph to get to the good stuff below.)  Maybe it's just me, but I feel like I very rarely have 2 or 3 overripe bananas sitting around to make banana bread.  In my house, bananas go quickly.  However, once in a while, there's that single banana that gets ripe on the sly, so that no one notices until it's just a tad too brown to be appetizing.  The Single Ripe Banana always gives me problems, because I want to put it to good use but don't really want to eat it, but also have no other ripe banana companions to make into bread.  Enter: banana bread cookies.  They only require a single banana, but still have full banana bread flavor.

The recipe for this comes from a vegan cookie book written by Isa Chandra, one of my favorite vegan chef/authors.  I tweaked things ever so slightly, but most things stayed the same.

Ingredients:

• 1 very ripe medium banana
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3/4 cup plus 2 Tbs AP flour
• 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 cups quick-cooking oats
• 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• Cinnamon sugar, for sprinkling

Recipe:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease two baking sheets.
2. In a medium size bowl, mash the banana (you can just use a fork).  Add oil, sugar, and vanilla, and mix together.
3. Add the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt, and mix until all the ingredients are just combined.
4. Add the oats, walnuts, and chocolate chips.  Make sure everything is mixed together well.  If the dough is really loose still, add a bit more flour.
5. Roll the dough into balls, and flatten slightly on the baking sheet.  If the dough sticks to your hands, you can wet your hands to smooth out the tops.  Or just leave them jagged and imperfect. They're homemade cookies, dammit.
6. (Optional) Sprinkle some cinnamon sugar over the tops.
7. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until lightly browned.  Let them cool for a couple minutes on the tray before transferring them to a cooling rack.

As you can see, I totally gave up on the smooth, perfect cookie and opted for the more rugged look.  I also may or may not have eaten about four of these cookies straight out of the oven and burned my tongue on molten chocolate.  Totally worth it.