Work In Progress: Elvis Cookies

Because if there's one thing Elvis really loved, it was really, really, spectacularly tacky shit. But if there was another thing he loved it was fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Now in cookie form!

Not all of my posts are going to be food based, I promise. The problem is that I’ve been home alone all weekend, and when I’m home and there’s a stocked kitchen, things just kind of happen to get made. So, I had two bananas that had gone past their eating prime and needed to be baked into something. I also have an unbridled love for peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and this recipe lying around for peanut butter cookies. Easiest math I have ever had to do.

(Mushy bananas + peanut butter cookies) x hours of free time = AWESOME

Ingredients

·         1 ¼ cup whole wheat flour

·         1 tsp baking soda

·         ¼ tsp salt

·         1 cup peanut butter

·         ½ butter

·         ½ cup light brown sugar

·         ¼ cup unsweetened apple sauce

·         1 egg

·         ½ tsp vanilla extract

·         2 medium sized, mushy bananas.

Yes, again with the whole wheat flour. I put whole wheat flour into everything I think I can get away with. About three months ago I switched over from white everything to wheat everything: bread, pasta, tortillas, whatever. I become one of those people you see in the supermarket checking the ingredients on packages before I buy something. For the record, just because you’re buying whole wheat something doesn’t mean that it’s all whole wheat. If you see the words ‘enriched’ or ‘bleached’ in the ingredients list, than the packaging is a lying sack of shit.

With the peanut butter, chunky and creamy both work, like in any peanut butter cookie.

The unsweetened apple sauce replaces sugar in this recipe. Not only am I one of those people checking ingredients in the supermarket, I once spent two hours doing my food shopping consulting a copy of Eat This Not That without shame. That’s where I learned that unsweetened applesauce is, if I remember right, half the calories and with zero sugar, obviously. And it tastes the same. Namely, delicious. So if you get those snack packs of unsweetened apple sauce, each one is half a cup, so you can put in half into the batter and eat the rest. With cinnamon and nutmeg. Mmm.

In the end, I put in about a sixth of a cup of sugar into my batter just because it looked too loose and I wanted to thicken it up and actually I have no idea of going about that. The bananas I mushed separately and then put into the batter.

I spooned the batter on with a tablespoon and sprinkle just a little bit of sugar on top. And then I sprinkled cinnamon on just a few of the cookies, just to see how that would taste.

I left them in the oven for thirteen minutes. BUT, I like my cookies slightly undercooked and soft. These cookies are going to be light and fluffy, more like cake than the traditional ‘lead sinker’ consistency some of the best peanut butter cookies come with. I’m not sure you can get these guys to be crunchy without burning them, is what I’m saying, but you can leave them in longer if you want to.

Result

Next time, I’m putting in another half cup of peanut butter, cutting the butter in half, and putting cinnamon in every cookie because damn that’s good. These are a just a work in progress, remember, so if you have any tips let me hear them, and I'll post again when I've tried something different with the recipe.

 

Dammit, Elvis Cookies. Be more delicious!