Real Food: Breakfast Cookies



Right now I'm enjoying Shauna Niequist's new book Bread & Wine and this morning I read her recipe for Breakfast Cookies, which is adapted from Nikki's Healthy Cookies, which was featured on Heidi Swanson's blog. 

I thought:

1.  Heidi Swanson has a blog???  How have I missed this?  And immediately added it to my Feedly.* 

2.  We could wolf these down for lunch today.

Note:  Niequist gives many suggestions for how to customize this recipe- it's very basic and you really can't mess them up (add different nuts or extracts, dried fruit etc.) 

First I'll give you her own version, then down below I'll add a note to say how I made these myself. 

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Breakfast Cookies

from Bread & Wine

Serves 12

3 large ripe bananas, well mashed (about 1 1/2 C)

1/4 C coconut oil warmed to a liquid (you can also substitute olive oil)

1 t vanilla

1 C rolled oats

2/3 C almond meal

1/2 t baking powder

2/3 C shredded coconut

1/2 C chopped walnuts

1/4 C chocolate chips

Instructions:

In a large bowl, mash the bananas with a fork, then add in coconut oil and vanilla.

Add the oats, almond meal, salt, and baking powder, and stir until combined.  Add the coconut, walnuts, and chocolate chips, and stir again.

Form the dough into 12 balls on a parchment-lined baking sheet and flatten them a little bit.  Bake at 350 degrees for 14 to 16 minutes.

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Doesn't that sound easy and good?  Here are a few notes about how I made ours:

1.  I recently purchased almonds for making almond meal, so once I'd finished making that up in my food processor I stored it away and used my processor to bring the cookies together since it was already out.  I think this was a bonus, I'll say more about that later.

2.  So after processing my bananas I left the machine running and poured my coconut oil and extract in through the tube.  I substituted almond extract for the vanilla.  Then I removed the top of my processor and added in the oats, almond meal, baking powder, and coconut.  I then pulsed everything together until it was uniform.

I didn't add extra nuts or chocolate, but if I had wanted to, I would have incorporated them by hand at the end. 

We keep chocolate bars on-hand in the summer for s'mores, so I cut one of those up into 24 pieces (I doubled the batch for 24 cookies) and pressed a little piece of milk chocolate into each one before baking.

3. Because I used my processor, the consistency of these cookies became uniform and fine.  So that texture combined with the almond extract and all the other ingredients made cookies that are a sweet hybrid of banana bread/macaroons/oatmeal cookies/almond joy bars.

They were delicious. 

The five of us ate an entire batch at lunch with big bowls of melon and strawberries, then sealed up the second batch to have tomorrow.


*Side note- I am loving Feedly so much. The clean, beautiful, and very organized design is a dream for creative pragmatist readers like me.