Recipe for easy and healthy cookies

The healthy cookies can be whipped up in a jiffy, and the ingredient list is delightfully short. You probably already have most of the ingredients in stock, and otherwise they can easily be found in all supermarkets. The base for these easy cookies is oatmeal and ripe bananas. It is really delicious to use ripe bananas in healthy cooking, as it gives a natural sweetness and good consistency. Try, for example this incredibly popular banana bread, this wonderful recipe for healthy muffins with banana and peanut butter or these banana pancakes. Bananas can also be made into delicious banana ice cream with chocolate or you can mix ripe bananas into granola, like in this great recipe for banana granola. 

Ingredients

To make healthy cookies, you will need the following ingredients:

• Oatmeal: It is best to use a mixture of fine and coarse rolled oats, as this gives the best consistency.
• Banana: The base for the cookies is made from oatmeal mashed with banana. It is important that you use ripe bananas as this adds the right consistency and sweetness to the cookies.
• Honey or maple syrup: The recipe uses honey, but you can choose maple syrup to make your healthy cookies vegan. If you use very sweet and ripe bananas, you can skip the extra sweetness from honey or maple syrup.
• Coconut oil or butter: Butter gives the best flavor, but for vegan cookies, you can use coconut oil.
• Peanut butter: The crunchiness of these healthy cookies can be achieved by adding peanut butter or other nut butter. If you like the taste of peanut butter, it is the cheapest and most readily available alternative. However, if you prefer a more neutral taste, I would recommend making your own nut butter, for example from almonds. You can find this recipe for homemade nut butter here.
• Dark chocolate: Feel free to add some coarsely chopped dark chocolate to your cookies. Alternatively, you can use chopped nuts, raisins or similar. 

Video: How to make healthy cookies

In this video you can see how easy it is to make the recipe for banana, oatmeal and peanut butter cookies:   

Good advice for the best healthy cookies

• It is better to set the oven to a slightly lower temperature (max 150 degrees) and bake the cookies for longer. This will dry them out more, making them more crispy.
• Adjust the amount of oatmeal depending on the size of your bananas. Add a little at a time, and stop when you have a mass that can be shaped without being too sticky.
• Be careful not to make the cookies too thick if you want them to be perfectly crispy. If they are made thicker, they will be more like granola bars - and that is also delicious!
• Use a mix of coarse and fine rolled oats. This gives the perfect coarse consistency but ensures that the cookies are still easy to shape.

Vegan healthy cookies

The cookie recipe can easily be made vegan. Use maple syrup or agave syrup instead of honey. And choose coconut oil instead of butter. If you want to make sugar-free cookies completely without any added sugar, you can omit honey or maple syrup.  

Healthy recipes with chocolate

If you also love chocolate, here are more recipes for healthier alternatives with chocolate: 

• Tahini blondies with chocolate
• Homemade Toblerone
• Gluten-free banana muffins with chocolate
• Healthy homemade chocolate
• Ice cream chocolates
• Homemade Nutella