The Best Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies

Banana bread has been all the rage lately. People have been stuck at home with not much else to do but bake, and for some reason everyone has been baking banana bread. I get it, its easy and delicious. I made some banana bread too, but then I got tired of banana bread and wanted to do something different with my overripe brown bananas. And then I realized that banana chocolate chip cookies would taste amazing.

The first thing I did was google banana chocolate chip cookies to see what was out there. I didn't intend to invent my own recipe for these, but what I found overwhelmingly was a lot of recipes for very cakey banana cookies. In fact the recipe inventors talked about how excited they were that their cookies were so cakey. I started this journey by making one of those recipes, and they were very good, but they were more like muffin tops than cookies. That wasn't what I wanted at all! I wanted more of a true chewy chocolate chip cookie with banana in it. And so I began testing cookie recipes. It took 8 batches of cookies to get these right, but they are absolutely perfect.

I learned from my days of baking for a vegan friend that bananas are a substitute for eggs. I tried these cookies several times with different amounts of eggs plus the bananas, but ultimately any amount of eggs I added made the cookies too cakey. But with the eggs omitted completely and using just one large banana these cookies became the perfect chewy cookie.

These cookies are moist, have a bit of a crunchy exterior, but are still soft inside, and taste amazing.