Banana and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Costco strikes again! We have a ginormous bag (25 whole pounds!) of flour from Costco and we're going through it surprisingly fast. I guess knowing that I have a ton of flour encourages me to bake more. I'll slowly post all the goodies that we've been making in this house as I get them written up (but I tend to be super slow about it - so I apologize in advance).

Baking still makes a bigger mess than I'd like it to, but I gotta say, it's not nearly as scary or hard as I once thought it was. The key is to follow the directions. You can't get away with eyeballing measurements, flavoring stuff "to taste", adding little extra somethings, or making substitions for things you don't have on hand or find icky like you can in cooking. Having a stand mixer definitely helps to. And I'm also getting better about cleaning up after myself as I bake like I do with cooking. Yay for me!

Now on to what I made with this big bag of flour - banana and chocolate chip cookies! I really like the combo of bananas and chocolate, so I thought this would be a great little treat to make and to use up some of the mushy bananas, plus I wanted to try an alternative use for mushy bananas besides smoothies and banana bread. It turned out pretty good for the most part. Some things to keep in mind if you want to try this are that the texture was more like a cake than a cookie as you can see below.

Another important thing is that usually with cookies you take them out before they look done and they'll firm up as they cool. With these, don't do that. My first batch was undercooked and was super mushy, and even putting them back in the oven didn't really help. It was kind of like all the banana floated to the top of the cookie and created a sticky, mushy layer on top that just wouldn't go away no matter how long I re-baked it for. I baked my second batch longer and they turned out much better (they still have the consistency of cake though).

Anyway, if you're interested in trying it, I got the recipe from Simply Recipes

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 egg, room temperature
• 1 cup of mashed bananas (about 2 ½ large bananas)
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• 2 cups of flour
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground mace or nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves
• 1 cup of pecans (walnuts and chocolate chips are fine alternatives)

Method

1 Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the egg and continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.

2 In a bowl, mix the mashed bananas and baking soda. Let sit for 2 minutes. The baking soda will react with the acid in the bananas which in turn will give the cookies their lift and rise.

3 Mix the banana mixture into the butter mixture. Mix together the flour, salt, and spices and sift into the butter and banana mixture and mix until just combined.

4 Fold into the batter the pecans or chocolate chips if using. Drop in dollops onto parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Bake for 11-13 minutes or until nicely golden brown. Let cool on wire racks.

Makes about 30 cookies.