I love buying loose bananas. I’m not picky about how ripe or bruised my bananas are, so I’m happy to pay just a half or quarter of the price. The extra bananas go into my freezer, which make great smoothies and banana bread.
For many years, banana bread was my go-to baked good. It’s easy to make, generally enjoyed, and seemingly healthy because it has bananas in it. Over the past year, I have made far fewer loaves because I typically brought them to the office for my coworkers. However, I have been trying to clear out my freezer recently, and rather than bake banana bread, I found a cookie recipe to use up as many as I could.
One downside to using frozen bananas is that the consistency completely changes. Rather than an even, homogenous mash, I have a few solid pieces floating in banana juice. I haven’t tested whether it makes a difference in the final baked product.
The recipe calls for a spice blend, including cinnamon, mace, and cloves. All of these spices are old. My cinnamon jar is refilled from a Costco-sized container I have used for years. The mace is from my mom, who also likely has had it for years, so I would peg it as no less than 20 years old. And I don’t even know when I got the cloves.
The mixing starts with creamed butter and sugar with eggs next. After that, I mixed in the bananas, which immediately curdled due to its consistency (or lack thereof). I was pretty sure it wasn’t okay, but I was already committed.
Fortunately, it all came together when I added the dry ingredients.
The resulting dough was quite soft and scooped easily. Although Bravetart says that parchment is better than silicone mats, I didn’t have any pre-cut, and I got lazy since I didn’t have really high hopes for the recipe anyways.
The first batch baked evenly with a soft, wet texture.
I continued with the second and third batches, and I was surprise by how different the final batch turned out. I think the temperature, timing, and dough was quite similar, so I can only guess that the additional resting time somehow changed the dough. The recipe does mention the importance of the baking soda-banana reaction.
Overall, the cookies were nice. They actually really tasted just like banana bread in the shape of a cookie. Fort he same effort, I probably would just bake banana bread in the future, but maybe it’s better to only have cookie-sized portions instead of full slices.
If you’re bored of banana bread, try these not banana bread cookies from Simply Recipes.