So, I am a huge fan of baking chocolate chunk cookies. Also, I am an even bigger fan of eating chocolate chunk cookie dough. *Disclaimer: don’t eat raw eggs like me, i’m a terrible influence* The recipe i’ve used almost my whole life can be found on the back of the Nestle Toll House chocolate chip bags. I’ve mixed it up a bit in the past as far as using more brown sugar and less white sugar, replacing a stick of butter with a banana and less white sugar, etc.
The most adventurous I’ve gotten was when I ran out of all purpose flour this weekend after just coming back from the grocery store. With no interest in going back out and the idea of baking cookies looking like less of an option, I spotted a sack of flour in the very back of my pantry, thinking I was saved. I was disheartened however, to find it was bread flour. Instantly I started googling whether I could simply replace the two evenly. Nothing gave me a definitive answer and all the sites suggested that I was baking bread. Well, what could I lose other than a whole batch of cookies, right? So I replaced the flour exactly as I would have used the all purpose.
After 11 minutes I went to take the cookies out of the oven, and they all slipped off the tray onto the oven door. Amateur hour was feeling pretty real and I might have reacted a bit childishly, I digress. All I had left other than the pile of chocolatey disaster that exemplified my life’s failures, was enough dough to make 6 cookies. Well let me tell you that these were the 6 best chocolate chip cookies I had ever made. As someone who prefers chewy over crispy, the bread flour definitely made a huge difference.
This has made me want to experiment with more of my favorite recipes! There is a certain amount of science to baking and always a chance that something like butter is in a recipe for reasons other than deliciousness, but with a bit of online research, it’s getting easier and easier to swap out ingredients that you would rather stay away from. The nice part of doing something like that is that if you are allergic to certain ingredients or sensitive to things like dairy or gluten, you don’t necessarily lose the opportunity to have cookies again. Research, experiment, and keep track of what you did. That way you can copy it again if you love the results or tweak things next time to find your perfect recipe!
So, here is my recipe for Banana Chocolate Chunk cookies, and I hope you love them as much as I do! They are a bit fluffier than their non-banana filled predecessors, but still delicious! 🙂 Also, 1 egg and stick of butter less than the normal recipe (good news for your cholesterol!) Happy baking and let us know below in the comments some of your favorite tweaked baking recipes!
Happy Baking!
-Bridget
Prep Time | 20 minutes |
Cook Time | 10-12 minutes |
Servings |
dozen
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- 2.25 cup(s) Bread Flour (All-purpose works as well, just differently)
- 1 cup(s) Brown Sugar
- .25 cup(s) Sugar
- 1 Egg
- 1 Large Banana mashed (the riper, the sweeter they are!)
- .5 cup(s) butter softened
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp Baking Soda
- 1 12oz package Semi-sweet Chocolate Chunks Nestle Toll House are my fav!
Ingredients
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|
- Preheat oven to 375F
- Combine brown sugar, white sugar, softened butter, mashed banana, and vanilla in large mixer bowl and mix until creamy.
- Add mixture of flour, salt, and baking soda to the sugar bowl and combine thoroughly.
- Add 1 egg and mix well until it's completely incorporated. (I add the egg last that way there's no fear of the mixture being too warm from the possibly over heated butter)
- Stir in the chocolate chunks by hand! Whenever I put them in the mixer it pulverizes them- not necessarily a bad thing, just a hassle to get off my mixer.
- After laying the silicone mat (or parchment paper) on a non-greased baking pan, use your cookie scoop to make the cookies about the same size.
- Bake for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown.
- Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes and then move to wire racks to finish cooling.
- Grab the milk and enjoy!