This is an adaptation of a woefully half-remembered recipe printed in the Guardian Weekend sometime in the last year. I've been looking for it all week and finally decided to have a stab myself and see what I came up with. Fortunately, I seem to have remembered more than I thought, because these babies turned out beautifully! Very chewy with subtle hints of banana and dripping with chocolate. Huzzah! (Please excuse my mixed measurements, I've three sets of implements and terrible conversion skills. My project for this week is to convert them all properly and delete this sentence.)
ingredients:
1 cup butter/vegan marg, softened
1 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 cup raw cane sugar (or granulated, whichever's closer to hand)
3 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking powder
2 mushy bananas
12 ounces rolled oats
3 ounces whole wheat flakes
3 ounces pumpkin seeds
150 grams Green and Black's dark chocolate
method:
Pre-heat your oven to 185 degrees Celsius.
Cream together the butter and sugar using the flat side of a wooden spoon (common sense to some, wild new enterprise in blending to others). Once the butter has stopped peering out through the sugar in thick yellow globs, and it's all smooth and lovely, mix in the vanilla and baking powder. Then add the banana. Even though my banana peel were spotty and brown, they were still a bit firm. Rather than break out the masher, or a spoon, and pull a Jamie Oliver on them, I simply squishing them inside their skins until they start to ooze out through crack in their casing -- a little messy, but deliciously naughty.
As it turns out, I did need to mash them a little, even after that, but any spoon/fork/fist will do. Mix it in until the batter is consistently gloopy.
Now, you could just fold in the oats and leave it at that, but the Guardian recipe I can't remember definitely required they be pulverised into a fine grainy mist. The pumpkin seeds and whole wheat flakes are my additions (and if you don't have them, use the equivalent weight in oat instead), and should be ground accordingly.
Once you have your 'flour' ready, fold it in gently. It'll look a bit like untouched seabed: spiky and gnarled.
Chop up your chocolate, adding as much or as little as you like, fold it into the mix and voila! Your batter is ready to be spooned onto a well-greased tray and popped in the oven. I initially went for 12 minutes, then realised that they come out on the ubersoft side of things when I baked them for 10 minutes instead. I managed to get 27 cookies out of this and froze the rest for later. I shall have to post an update on whether or not freezing leaves me with dull, grey sludge or ready-for-baking batter.
A pot of tea brewing on the side makes this a gorgeous way to spend a Sunday afternoon sitting around knitting and watching films. Grizzly Man and Shaun of the Dead, if you must know.
UPDATE! When blitzing the oat/whole wheat flakes/pumpkin seeds, I used the attachment that comes with my Braun hand blender. It does work well, but I've been told a small coffee grinder works better -- even if it is a little more fiddly and you have be extra careful cleaning it. Pumpkin grounds in coffee... A fibre-filled way to start the day.
Posted by: Emmms | November 26, 2006 at 05:50 PM
UPDATE! I managed to get another fifteen cookies out of the leftover frozen batter, so that's a round forty-two altogether. I reckon you could easily stretch it out to an even four dozen if you're not so keen on cookies the size of small hubcaps...
Posted by: Emmms | November 26, 2006 at 05:46 PM