Banana "Muffin Top" Cookies
Or alternatively, Banana Bread Cookies
A major problem bakers run into when adding fruit flavor to cookies, cakes, and more is dealing with extra moisture. Fruits are comprised of mostly water — and when you’re making quick breads like banana or pumpkin bread, that’s a boon. Fruit and vegetable purees (or grated flesh like zucchini or carrot) not only bring flavor and color, but they’re also great at holding onto their water during the bake and keeping the finished product moist for a long time.
But sometimes, there’s too high a ratio of water to actual flavor. Recipe developers chase after pumpkin cookies that are chewy, not cakey, but still taste like pumpkin. But chewy cookies require low moisture, so we’ve figured out that you need to remove some of the moisture from the pumpkin by cooking it on the stovetop or oven-roasting it. Fruit flavors can also be more diluted than we want them to be after adding them to a mixture like, for example, buttercream. That’s why, in my lavender blackberry chocolate bars, we cook down the blackberry puree, concentrating its flavor before adding it to the buttercream.
In October 2024, I published a recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip cookies made famous in my circle by a friend who grew up eating and making the recipe (which came to her from a family friend). They are so simple — elegantly so. Everything comes together in one bowl. There’s no browning butter. There’s no dough chill-time. You don’t have to cook the pumpkin down — and it uses exactly one can. You don’t even need eggs!
When I promoted them on social media, likely more than 100 people commented saying that they grew up with cookies similar to these, or that their family member had a recipe like it. That makes total sense — these types of family recipes usually share one or two common points of origin like a magazine or cookbook, and then get passed down and changed over the years. Regardless, it’s still one of the most popular recipes on the blog and on here because it’s so simple — and so good.
Some people, however, lamented at the fact that these were “cakey” cookies and wondered if there was a way to make them flatter and chewier — which, for me, completely defeats the purpose. I love flat and chewy cookies like any other self-respecting foodie influencer, but these are supposed to be cakey!
All that being said, an vision popped into my head a few weeks ago of a banana cookie that resembled the dome of a banana nut muffin. I wondered if I could replicate the look and feel of the pumpkin chocolate chip cookie recipe with mashed banana, and after several tests, it worked. (Spoiler, it was not as easy as replacing the pumpkin puree with banana.)
Makes 16 cookies
Ingredients
