A few weeks ago while at the store for my weekly grocery trip, I gently nestled a bunch of perfectly yellow bananas into my shopping cart. For a while during graduate school, I ate a banana every morning as part of my breakfast, and although I switched to drinking this protein smoothie a couple years ago instead, I recently started to miss my morning banana ritual.
I continued walking around the produce section, picking up fruit for my favorite apple crumble and these incredible oatmeal cookies (have you tried either of those yet?? SO good!), along with vegetables for dinner. Once I crossed everything off of my list, I headed up to the front registers to pay.
When I unpacked my bags at home, I realized the checkout clerk hadn’t been quite as careful with those bananas… They ended up beneath a sack of flour, and one had already turned brown and bruised.
So I set that one aside and used it to make these Healthy Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies a few days later. They’re one of my most popular recipes—and for a good reason! They’re perfectly chewy, full of sweet fruity flavor, and packed with chocolate. Plus they contain no eggs, refined flour or sugar and only 90 calories!
Watch my video below to see just how easy they are to make, then grab my recipe directly beneath the video!
These cookies would go over well here at my house. Anytime I am baking something I seem to get distracted too! I totally feel ya!
I’d love to hear what you think if you try these cookies Melissa! 🙂
I would like to try them,they look amazing and wish to serve them in high tea in our hotel……looks very yummy…..
I’m honored by your interest in my recipe David! I’d love to hear what you think if you try these cookies! 🙂
These cookies look amazing! I can’t wait to make them for my toddler. I’m sure they’d be a nice treat to find in her lunch box.
You’re such an amazing mom to bake your little girl homemade cookies! I’d love to hear what she thinks of them if you try this recipe Melissa! 🙂
I think there is something off with the recipe. I started making it using the exact quantities listed but found the dough very dry and with what looked like too few chocolate chips. Actually more like a pie crust dough. So I added about 3 more tablespoons of chip, another half banana and 1.5 more tablespoons of coconut oil. That resulted in more of what I think a cookie dough should be like. Baked results were good, though definitely on the very sot side.
It means a lot that you tried our recipe, Al! That sounds disappointing and not like how the cookie dough should be, so we’d love to work with you to figure out what happened. In order to do so, I have some questions for you! 🙂
Other than the ones that you listed (another 1 ½ tablespoons of coconut oil, another half banana, and more chocolate chips), did you make any other modifications or substitutions to the recipe — including those listed in the Notes section?
Did you use a kitchen scale or measuring cups/spoons to measure all of the ingredients — especially the flour, banana, and coconut sugar?
If you used measuring cups, did you use our special fork trick for measuring the flour?
Again, if you used measuring cups, did you happen to shake or nudge the measuring cup back and forth while filling it, to “level out” the mound of flour, by any chance?
Which flour option did you use: white whole wheat flour or one of the gluten-free options we provided in the Notes section?
What brand of coconut sugar did you use?
Do you know the volume the extra half banana that you added? (I’m assuming you might not have measured exactly, but it’d still be helpful to know a guesstimate in cups or grams!)
Could you describe the consistency of your cookie dough after making your modifications? Was it moist and a little sticky, like in our video?
I know I just asked a LOT of questions, but we’ll have a much better idea of the culprit once we know your answers to all of them!
Thanks for the quick reply.
No other modifications or substitutions to the recipe. I should mention that I used regular whole wheat flour, assuming that’s what was meant by “white whole wheat flour”.
I used measuring cups and spoons for all ingredients except the banana, which I just used 1/2 a banana. Your question mentions coconut sugar but I used light brown sugar which is called for in the recipe.
I scooped the flour out of the bag and shook it to level it off. Sorry, don’t know anything about your fork trick.
I did not measure the banana but would say the whole fruit was medium to large size, not small. That would have only added more moisture to the dough, so I doubt that is the problem.
The dough had the consistency of soft modeling clay and was not really sticky. Kind of like the dough in store bought cookie dough that comes frozen in a tube.
Before adding the extra coconut oil, milk and chips the dough was very dry. Hope that helps!
You’re welcome, Al! We’re happy to help. Thank you for sharing this additional information; it’s really useful.
White whole wheat flour and regular whole wheat flour are actually two different things! Amy went over the differences between the two in the text of her blog post above the recipe box. It’s underneath the section titled “Key Ingredients to Make Healthy Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies” — I know it can be easy to miss though!
We’ve found the culprits! They’re how the flour and bananas were measured. It’s really important that these are measured correctly, which is why Amy included bold headlines about each of them in the Notes section of the recipe. (The Notes section is located directly underneath the Instructions!) We highly recommend reviewing these “Read Before Beginning” tips in the Notes section before making your next batch of cookies!
For the flour, we linked to our fork trick in that Notes section (the underlined pink “this method” text), as well as the Ingredients list (the underlined pink “like this” text next to the flour).
When flour is measured in the way you described, where it’s scooped from the bag and shaken to level off, you actually end up adding 1.5x as much as when you spoon and level (or “fork” and level, with our trick!). That means you ended up adding 1 ½ cups of flour to your cookie dough, rather than 1 cup. That extra flour would definitely make your cookie dough much too dry!
For the mashed banana, it needs to be measured in cups or grams. Because not all bananas are the same size, using 1 banana to measure (or part of 1 banana) often results in adding the incorrect amount. This throws off the ratio of wet and dry ingredients, which then affects the texture of your dough and baked cookies.
Thank you for your detailed description of the cookie dough. It’s incredibly helpful to have that visual! When you first mix it together, this cookie dough should be noticeably softer and stickier than modeling clay or store-bought tube-style cookie dough — almost like super stiff muffin batter. (You can see the consistency of our cookie dough in the video above, between the 24-29 second marks!) Chilling should help stiffen it, but it should still be soft after chilling. It should stick to your hands if you tried touching or shaping it.
So to quickly recap, we recommend reviewing the recipe’s Notes section (especially the “Read Before Beginning” parts!) and correctly measuring the flour and banana. Doing so should help your next batch of these banana cookies turn out much better!
Does all of this make sense? I’m happy to answer any questions you might have! 🙂
Thank you for taking time to provide the info you did. I’ll have another look at the site and make sure to follow the additional directions more closely next time.
We’re happy to help any time, Al! We’d love to hear how it goes next time if you decide to try these cookies again (or any of our other recipes)! 😉