Update, 3/30/09: Actually, I take that back. The lemon cookies weren’t so much a huge plate of FAIL as an exercise in delayed gratification: they tasted much better the next morning, once the doughy-ness had transformed to chewiness. Methinks the problem rests not in the batter or cook time, but in my lack of a cooling rack. Currently, I have to remove freshly baked cookies from the sheet asap, otherwise they tend to stick. The lemon cookies probably needed to sit a bit, hence the trouble I encountered when scraping them off. A cooling rack might make all the difference.
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The last time I made a batch of Oatmeal Banana Cookies, I wasn’t able to enjoy them as much as I would’ve liked. Truth be told, I felt a wee bit guilty. The dogs, you see, started begging like lil’ vegan monsters before the goodies even came out of the oven. I’m fairly certain that they thought the cookies were meant for them, since the week before I’d made some pizza biscuits for Rennie’s birthday. So I resolved to adapt the recipe to make a doggy edition.
Which I did, yesterday. I took the last version of the human Oatmeal Banana Cookie recipe and made a few changes: omitted the salt, cut the sugar down to almost nothing, and added a few extra ingredients that I just so happened to have on hand. The result? Total success! The dogs absolutely loved the cookies. They’re also 100% suitable for human consumption (really, shouldn’t everything we feed our nonhuman friends be?), if a little bland. By which I mean unsweetened. But maybe unsweetened is your thing?
Again, this recipe has proven extremely versatile. The oat/soymilk combo makes the dough impossible to mess up: Too dry? Add some soymilk! Too wet? Toss in some oats and/or let sit! As long as you taste test the dough before baking, and like what goes in, you’ll love what comes out of the oven.
Oatmeal Banana Cookies: Doggy edition!
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon + a little extra to taste
1/2 cup of dark brown sugar (or less)
Slightly less than 1/3 of a cup of vegetable oil
1 banana, mashed to liquid (the riper, the better)
1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1/2 to 1 cup of water or soy milk
2 1/4 cups of quick oats
Several handfuls, give or take, dried fruit (cranberries, cherries, blueberries, apricots, etc.) to taste; for this recipe, I used about 4 handfuls of dried cranberries and 4 of homemade dehydrated apple slices
Note: If this is for your furry friends, do not use chocolate chips!
Optional: Add some backstrap molasses, nutmeg and/or wheat germ.
(More below the fold…)