Banana Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Cookies

I buy bananas from the grocery store every week. I even bought a little banana hanger so that they didn’t go bad so quickly. But my cheap habit of turning my air conditioning off during the day … and it being a million degrees in Boston this week … meant these bananas got wicked brown very fast. I did read that you can freeze brown bananas to use for future baking, so 2 of these 4 went into my freezer.

Banana is easy to throw into muffins or to make banana bread with, but because of the mushy consistency it’s hard to experiment with. Last time I worked with peanut butter and chocolate chips … but I had a bag of cinnamon chips I’ve never baked with before so figured banana and cinnamon is always a good combo. I read a few different recipes and decided to just wing it. If I did it again, I might use a little more brown sugar.

Ingredients:

  • 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 cup butter, softened
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 2 mashed bananas
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 2 cups quaker oats
  • 1 2/3 cups cinnamon chips

 

Step 1: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Beat together butter and sugars. Add in vanilla and egg and mix well.

Step 2: Mash up two large bananas. I use a mashed potato masher because it’s fun and I have one … but you can use the back of a fork if you need to.

Step 3: In a separate bowl mix together flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Add into the wet mixture. Then mix in the oatmeal.  My batter was looking more banana bready and not dry enough to be a cookie … so I had started with 1 cup of flour and ended up adding in another half cup until it had cookie consistency.

Step 4:  Add in 1 2/3 cups (or 1 bag) of cinnamon chips. There are interesting. Definitely worth trying. But they have a nice flavor to them.

 

Step 5: Scoop even size balls of dough onto a parchment or sil-pat lined baking sheet. Press them down lightly with your fingers before baking. Bake at 375 for about 10-12 minutes.

I have a feeling these are going to be gone well before breakfast time is over tomorrow morning. I’m pretty happy with the way this experiment turned out though I definitely had my doubts when the mixture wasn’t feeling cookie-enough. As always, my trusty coworkers will be the final judges of this experiment tomorrow. I’m still working on the sour patch cookie challenge that was left on my desk last week.