Yesterday I had a hankering for oatmeal raisin cookies.  Remembering that I had a recipe stored on my food blog, I looked it up.

Scanning through the ingredients to see what I had that matched up, I noticed three tiny problems: #1) I only had one stick of butter, not two. #2) I didn’t have any eggs. #3) I didn’t have the patience to make cookies.

Sooo what was I to do?  Throw out the recipe?

And miss out on an excellent dessert?

This was a time for some creative thinking! :)

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Problem number three was the easiest to fix.  Any cookie recipe can be made into bars they just take longer to bake.  I wasn’t worried about the baking time but I didn’t want to perform the meticulous task of forming the dough into balls.  So I decided not to test my patience and make bars instead. :)

Problem number two wasn’t so tricky, either.  I knew that flaxseed meal could be used in place of eggs (vegans do this a lot).  So that was another solution. . .

Problem number one took some thought, as I didn’t have any of the normal “fat substitutes,” namely applesauce.  But soon enough I remembered seeing on pinterest a recipe for cookies with bananas.  So that was an idea. . .

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As soon as these problems were solved, I went to work mixing up the batter.  Here is the recipe below! (The modified ingredients are colored in TEAL.)

What I used:

• 1 stick butter, softened
• 3/4 cup brown sugar, packed; plus 3/4 cup white sugar (next time I’ll only use 3/4 cup total, as it was much too sweet)
• 1 mashed banana (to replace the other stick of butter)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (instead of almond, which made the cookies taste fabulous!)
• 2 TBS flaxseed meal, plus 6 TBS water (to replace eggs)
• 1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups oats
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2-3/4 cups raisins

How I made it:

1. Preheated oven to 350F and poured 2 TBS of flaxseed into 6 TBS of water.
2. In a large bowl, I beat the softened butter with the sugar until creamy.  Added banana, vanilla, flaxseed meal/water.
3. In a separate bowl, I mixed all the dry ingredients (flour, oatmeal, baking soda, cinnamon).
4. Added 1/2 of dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Stirred slightly. Added the rest of the dry ingredients. Stirred slightly. Added the raisins and finished mixing.
5. Poured dough into a greased 9×9 baking dish/pan. Baked for 30ish minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle came out clean.

Analysis

As I mentioned in the ingredients list, this bread was much sweeter than I was anticipating. I plum forgot that bananas are sweet on their own; so I should have added HALF the amount of sugar I did. But Cobalt and I devoured it within a few days anyway :)

I’ll definitely be making this again sometime!

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