raw vegan banana bread and/or cookies

I just finished dinner and remembered I had my experimental banana cookies in the dehydrator. OMG OMG, OMG!! YUM!! Lucky I’m home alone because I groaned out loud in kind of a sexual way as I chewed my first bite… ooops ;)

Four cookies and some photography later I am satiated and can focus on a blog entry… maybe… ooops. There goes cookie #5…. and the decorative banana slices… and the walnuts… I’m a piggy!

So it seems that my first experimental cookie recipe turned out well, even if I do to say so myself . The motivation behind these was the large bunch of bananas I had ripening very quickly in my fruit bowl. I seem to buy 10-12 every week when I go shopping simply because I can. My mother, located in sunny, banana-producing Queensland Australia is currently paying up to $2 per banana, this time due to the floods over Christmas although there always seems to be some reason they’re super-expensive. In contrast, I can get organic, free-trade bananas from Costa Rica for 99c/pound here in less-than-tropical Boston USA.

I used to pause over the air miles involved in shipping these bad boys (and sometimes I still do)… promise. But then I looked up the organization, EARTH University and it sounds like it could be doing some good for local communities (although I hold full judgement until I make it over there to check it out for myself, like that will ever happen!!)

Anyway, I had sliced up some of these bananas and dehydrated them for 5 hours. Then I realized needed to do something with them. Besides using the banana, the only criteria I put in place was to create a sweetner-free cookie. I was going to call them banana fudge cookies but they taste so much like I remember banana bread tasting that it would be an injustice to call them anything else…

Ingredients:

• 1 cup raw cashews
• 1/2 cup raw walnuts
• 1 tbls mesquite
• 2 tsp lucuma powder
• 3 Medjool dates
• 1/2 cup dehydrated bananas for ~5 hours at 105° (approx 2 bananas)
• 3 tbls filtered water

Instructions:

• Blend the nuts, mesquite and lucuma in a food processor until it become a fine flour
• Add the dates and bananas and blend, adding water as necessary to develop a gooey mix
• Spoon on to Teflex dehydrator sheets – I did 1tbls scoops and use fingers to create rough circles (I love using fingers!) – I got 16 cookies and enough left-over dough to satisfy my immediate craving from these ingredients
• Dehydrate at 105° for 9 hours then flip onto mesh tray and dehydrate for another 9 hours if you can restrain yourself from eating it beforehand

Enjoy – I am!

xx

PS. I froze the other ripe bananas and will use them in smoothies and Karyn Calabrese’s Green Meal ‘Shake…

PPS. I got the lucuma and mesquite from my friends at Love Street Living Foods… they have some great raw vegan supplies and as an aside, make the best raw chocolate sauce ever!

Amendment: on the weekend I doubled the recipe and dehydrated it in a loaf tin and sliced it up so it now not only tastes like banana bread, but actually is banana bread! I lined the tin with aluminum foil and dehydrated the whole thing for 5 hours at 105° until a crust formed then tipped it upside down, took it out of the tin and the foil and dehydrated for 9 hours upside down. I then flipped it over and ‘iced’ it (1/4 cup cashews, 1/4 cup walnuts, juice of lemon and 1.5 tsp bourbon vanilla extract blended until mostly smooth – if my memory serves me correctly), dehydrated for a few hours until the icing was set then sliced it into thin slices and dehydrated them for another 9 hours so it’s wasn’t too moist… by it’s very nature it will stay moist on the inside, just like a good bananda bread should be. And I think next time, I’d top it with crushed walnuts for texture.