EVOLUTION OF THE RAW ONE BANANA COOKIE

OK, I’ve made crackers from flax seeds and got really interested in flax in our diet.  Some time ago I had watched the cutest video of little three-year-old Zion making cookies from flax seed, sunflower seeds, bananas, and cinnamon. In case you missed the last post, here it is again!  Too cute to miss!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_gfdStODZM

So I decided to try it.  Zoe’s recipe called for 1 tbsp flax seeds, 1 tbsp sunflower seeds, 2 bananas,  golden raisins, and 1/ 4 tsp cinnamon.  They were OK, but for my taste, they needed a little zip…

After playing around with various combinations, this is what I found worked really well for us.  The beauty of this recipe is that it’s so simple, if little Zion can do it, anyone can do it.

It satisfies that sweet tooth with no refined sugar. It’s a great way to expand a banana and use up odds and ends of nuts and seeds. Great way to introduce whole raw seeds into your kid’s diets. And when you have a hankering for cookies but it’s too hot to crank up the oven, these definitely fit the bill!


Recipe:
Grind the following to a coarse powder:

• 1 tbsp golden flax seed
• 1 tbsp sunflower seeds

Place in food processor
·         1 banana broken into pieces
·         1/3 c craisins – gives a little snap to the recipe, however, commercial ones have high fructose corn syrup –        home dehydrated is better

·         ¼ c pecan halves
·         Ground flax and sunflower seeds

Pulse until you have a coarse, lumpy mixture

Place in 1 tbsp blobs on fruit leather tray and flatten slightly with a fork

Dehydrate at 125º to 135º

When they are a bit firm and tacky (in about an hour or so), remove from fruit leather tray and place on dehydrator rack, bottom side up. This insures thorough drying.

Here are variations I tried:

• Add ¼ cup coconut – All I had was a dab of sweetened coconut, would have preferred home-dried, but was out
• Pinch of salt

Substitute nuts

• Whole raw cashews
• Whole raw almonds
         

How long to dry? 

• Don’t know!  Times may vary with machines and humidity where you live…
• One of the biggest problems we had was waiting for them to completely dry before gobbling them up! <chuckle> 

Here is the first batch based on Zion’s recipe. I used a one tablespoon portion scooper for these.. Zion sorta plopped them with a tablespoon. In this recipe I used two bananas and cinnamon. I didn’t have golden raisins, so I used craisins.

I tasted one and decided it was too bland, so I added a few more craisins on top.

I eventually realized that they would never dry in big balls, so I flattened them.

After about an hour, I removed them from the fruit leather tray and placed them on the rack to complete drying.  It took several more hours.  They were rather like soft cookies.

By now it was midnight. I was a bit worried that if I left them in the machine all night they would end up hard like a cracker, so after two hours of drying after I turned them over, I turned off the machine and went to bed.

Oh, my goodness! Somebody got into the cookies! Mike insists that he didn’t do it… I know I had to taste test a few, but….

This was all that was left of  the first two batches… They were a little …. Not really gummy, but a tad moist, so I put them back in the machine.

Then I started experimenting with cashews, almonds, coconut….. made two more batches. 

These are soo scrumptious, I just don’t know if I can share them with anyone but Mike…  I had thoughts of bringing a bunch of them to the Senior Center today at lunch time…but…L