Coconut and Banana Oatmeal Cookies

I have had a serious crush on this oatmeal cookie recipe since last summer...

The original recipe is Dorie's (but of course) and for the past one year I have been relentlessly playing around with her list of ingredients only to treat my family into awesome wholemeal cookies each time.  

Of the many different variations I tried one is worth mentioning... While in US, I once subbed the entire butter with olive oil and baked a batch of thin, almost lacey, crunchy oatmeal cookies. The berry season was on. Hence, for a seasonal treat, I had substituted the raisins with oven-dried blueberries and added some white chocolate chips for fun. I had replaced the egg with flax seed meal... plus an extra helping of olive oil. The end product was gorgeous..

and addictive...  I had however refrained from sharing the recipe then as the amount of oil used had felt way too much. I had intended to work on it later... but that never happened... since olive oil is expensive and blueberries almost non-existent in this part of India. So after lamenting over the ever increasing list of unavailable items in Bhubaneshwar, I did what any person in my place would do... I swapped the foreign flavors with local ones and baked a batch of coconut banana oatmeal cookies with chocochips for ... you know what.

Husband, son, friends, mother-in-law, all approved of it. Nevertheless there was scope for improvement. So a second, a third and a forth batch was baked until my friend said that the cookies rocked and were worth sharing with you... 

So here is the recipe for the oatmeal cookies we loved... Hope you'll like it too and like it enough to want to try out the Blueberry Olive oil variation too...

Coconut and Banana Oatmeal Cookies

Soft and delicious egg free banana oatmeal cookies with coconut, chocolate chips and raisins...

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Recipe adapted from In the Kitchen and on the road with Dorie Greenspan

Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes including 1 hour refrigeration time                                    
Yield: 18-20 cookies

 Ingredients

• ¼ cup over-ripe bananas, mashed
• ¼ cup oil
• 2 tablespoons butter, softened
• 3 tablespoons  sugar
• 4½ tablespoons demerara sugar
• ¼ teaspoon nutmeg powder
• 1 cup quick-cooking oats
• ⅓ cup whole wheat flour
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
• heaped ⅓ cup coconut (you can use pieces of coconut or ground coconut )
• ½ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips ( or raisins or chopped chocolate or a mixture of all.)

Directions

1. Add the bananas, oil, butter, coconut and the sugars in the jar of a blender and blend until the mixture looks smooth and creamy.
2. Pour out the contents in a mixing bowl. Add the flour, oats, nutmeg, salt and baking soda to the banana-sugar mixture and using a wooden spoon mix lightly until just combined.
3. Fold in the chocolate chips and/or raisins into the mixture.
4. Refrigerate the cookie dough for at least an hour. 
5. When ready to bake, take the cookie dough mixture out of the refrigerator and preheat the oven to 370 ° F.
6. Line two baking trays with parchment paper and drop 1-1½ tablespoon of the mixture into the prepared tray, flatten them with the back of the spoon and bake in preheated oven for 9-11 minutes. (These cookies do not spread much, so it is enough to keep 1 inch space between the flattened out cookie dough scoops.)
7. Remove from oven and cool in the baking tray for at least 10 minutes. Then transfer to cooling racks to finish cooling.

p.s: I find demerara sugar slightly sweeter than light brown sugar so I scaled the sugar level down a bit. In case you use light brown sugar, you might want to use 6 tablespoons of it instead of 4½ tablespoons.