Saturday, December 18, 2010

Slightly more healthy banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

  
It's been a long time since I've posted, and there's good reasons for that, but not very good reasons.  This Wednesday, I gave the first of my final exams, and I was feeling snacky.   We had some oatmeal, 1/2 of bag of chocolate chips, and other fixin's in the house.  But lately, I've been cutting back on the sugar, so I didn't want a typical cookie recipe (if you cut back on sugar, I find the going back to regular sweets can be a hit in the face of too sweetness).  I based these cookies off this Betty Crocker recipe, and they turned out pretty good, even with the substitutions.  This includes some mashed banana in lieu of butter, and the banana's sweetness substituting a lot of sugar.  The end result is really something in between a not too sweet but soft scone and a cookie. 

Ingredients:
3/4-1 c. of evaporated cane sugar
1 stick of butter (softened)
1 1/2 mashed bananas
1 teaspoon of vanilla
1 egg
1 1/2 c. of flour (i mixed white and whole wheat from King Arthur)
2 c. of old fashioned oats (I used Bob's Red Mill)
1 teas of baking soda
1/4 teas of salt
1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 c. of chopped walnuts

Method:
Preheat oven to 350
Cream together butter and sugar until well incorporated.  Add bananas, vanilla and egg (I used the whisk attachment on my hand blender).  Then add the dry ingredients (I skip the second bowl and try to mix the salt/soda in the flour on top first before mixing with the wet ingredients) and mix until moistened.  Finally, add the chips and nuts.
Bake on a cookie sheet (I fit about 16 on my large-ish Ikea sheet) for 10-12 minutes.  These take a bit longer to cook because of the lowered sugar content, and they aren't the same caramel brown like standard cookies, but they make up in softness and tastiness.