The biggest problem with Bananas is everybody either eats them all right away or they forget they have them and they go bad. Well this past week we would ourselves in the later category. We had big dreams of eating a banana a day and so on, but Thursday rolled around and we had a whole bunch of yellow and black bananas.

At this point we only had a two options, we could toss them or make the standard Banana Bread. While we don't have anything against Banana Bread, we just were not in the mood to make it. Instead we decided to look on the internet and see what other things we could do with the bananas.

After a few minutes combing through multiple banana bread recipes we saw a recipe for Banana Cookies. It was posted on a food blog called Vanilla Garlic. The name of the blog threw us for a second, but we looked anyway and saw this recipe comes from the bloggers grandmothers secret recipe stash. Once we saw it was a grandma recipe we knew that this was the one to try. I mean why would grandma steer you wrong, especially when it comes to cookies?

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup of sugar

1 egg, room temperature

1 cup of mashed bananas

1 teaspoon of baking soda

2 cups of flour

pinch of salt

1/2 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon of ground mace or nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves

(optional) 1 cup of pecans or walnuts or chocolate chips (or mix and match)

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350F. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and continue to beat until well mixed. Mix the mashed bananas and baking soda in a bowl and let sit for 2 minutes to froth a bit, this will give the cookies their rise. Mix the banana mixture into the butter mixture. Combine the flour, salt, and spices and mix into the butter and banana mixture until just combined. Fold in the pecans. Drop into dollops onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Bake for 11-13 minutes or until nicely golden brown. Let cool on wire racks.

Results:

This was a very simple recipe, with a lot of ingredients that every kitchen should already have. The ease of this recipe is important because it's not often that you plan to have bad bananas in the house. The cookies had great flavor and tasted very much like banana bread. Considering the ingredients are very similar it was bound to taste the same. We put toasted pecans into our cookies and suggest that everyone add nuts into theirs.

The cookies were softer than I had expected, more cake like than cookie. We found that after a few days these cookie hardened a bit and had a nice crunch to them. They went perfectly with a cold glass of milk. If you have old bananas and you want to try making something other than Banana Bread give these cookie a shot. Easy, quick and tasty just like a grandmother would make. Thank you to Vanilla Garlic for posting this recipe.