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! :)
- – – – -
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. . .
- – – – -
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:
- Preheated oven to 350F and poured 2 TBS of flaxseed into 6 TBS of water.
- In a large bowl, I beat the softened butter with the sugar until creamy. Added banana, vanilla, flaxseed meal/water.
- In a separate bowl, I mixed all the dry ingredients (flour, oatmeal, baking soda, cinnamon).
- 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.
- 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!