Recipe: Left Over Banana Cookies!

Sunday Baking Experiments!!!

I fortuitously intercepted a pair of very overripe bananas today from being trashed by one of my roomies and offered instead to think up some kind of banana based baked good for us all to eat. (Back in college, before the recession, when things were plentiful, Sundays were cleaning & baking day. I would get up and clean the apartment, do the laundry, and then bake cookies or brownies or rice crispy treats or whatever for us all for the week. Man, miss those days :) Anywho- I've come up with a dark chocolate banana cookie that's quite low in shortening and refined sugar. Somewhat like a biscotti if it were only baked once. Similarly I feel these will go best with a hot cup of tea or coffee or perhaps crumbled atop a frozen treat :)

Ingredients

 1/3 cup shortening (I used a combo of coconut oil and ghee)

1/2 tsp honey and 1 tsp raw monk fruit sweetener

2 large overripe bananas smushed with a fork

1/2 tbsp good bourbon vanilla 

1/2 tbsp scotch

1/2 cup Dutch process cocoa powder

1/4 cup unsweetened baking chocolate melted

2 cups flour (as it was for everyone I just used up a GF baking mix but you could use lower GI ones.)

1/2 tsp xanthan gum

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

pinch of cardamom

Directions

1. In a mixing bowl, add the shortening and sweetener and cream together with a hand mixer. A couple minutes as there's not much sweetener to mix in.
2. Add the vanilla and scotch. Keep mixing and add the mashed bananas and melted chocolate to the bowl and mix until combined.
3. In another bowl, mix the cocoa powder, flour, baking soda, salt, and cardamom. Slowly add the dry ingredients and continue mixing until incorporated.

Roll the dough into 2 logs that are about 2-inches high and 1-foot long. Wrap them in saran wrap and refrigerate for two hours. (Best method I found was to roll the log onto the saran wrap rather than try to pick it up. if you have old school racks in the fridge rather than flat shelving, place the logs into a pyrex or on another baking sheet to keep flat. (Due to the lack of egg, this makes GREAT cookie dough for eating, mixing into ice cream, etc. So you can stop here if you like)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Slice the cookies into 1/2-inch thick rounds, place on a cookie sheet and bake for 5 minutes.

BKBTY