Cookies for Breakfast?

It never fails. We buy a hand of bananas thinking we will eat them all before they get too ripe.

As best laid plans always go, I tend to have two to three overripe bananas lying around that need tossing. While there are copious amounts of recipes for banana bread, my crew will only eat it a few times a year, but they ALWAYS will eat a cookie.

Ta-DA! Breakfast Cookies!

I’m also a bit of a “Let’s throw this in” kind of cookie baker, and this recipe allows for those spur-of-the-moment decisions. What I love about this recipe is that a lot of the sweetness comes from the banana, so make sure that they truly are overripe, or your cookie isn’t going to tempt those discerning minis in your household.

This is a great make-ahead breakfast you can also use when planning travel. I like to serve it with a protein like a hard-boiled egg or breakfast meat and a side of berries, but you can also just throw it into their hands as they run off for the bus and know that they will have some energy until lunchtime.

If you attempt this as a gluten-free or dairy recipe, please let me know how it turned out and what flour and oil you used.

Banana Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies

Yield: 42 cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter (1 stick, unsalted)

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla

3 overripe bananas

1/4 to 1/2 cup of almond butter

2 cups all purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp ground cloves

2 tsp cornstarch

3 cups oatmeal (I used Bob’s Red Mill)

Optional Add-ins: dried coconut, walnuts, chopped dates, or raisins

Directions 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix together dry ingredients in a medium-sized bowl and set aside.

In a mixer mix together butter, brown sugar, egg, vanilla extract, mashed bananas and almond butter until well combined.

Add dry ingredients to the batter, mix.

Mix oats in 1 cup at a time until combined. This is when you can add a little of the suggested add-ins to taste or based on what you have on hand.

Cover the cookie sheet with parchment paper and use a large cookie scoop to spoon the dough onto the sheet. You can flatten the dough out a bit or leave them more rounded. They will spread just a bit when baked.

Happy baking!

Victoria Wise is the Tanglewood Moms founder, publishes Madeworthy magazine in Fort Worth, Texas, raises four awesome kids with her loving husband, and makes time as a board member for non-profits Lone Star Film Festival and Connected Commerce Council. Some of her accomplishments include being an inaugural member of Facebook’s SMB Council (now called Leader’s Network), being a Founding Member of TCU Neeley School’s Women to the Power of 10, receiving the 2019 Great Women of Texas Award by the Fort Worth Business Press, receiving the 2018 Legacy of Women Award by SafeHaven, and successfully selling a previous business in 2014.