Banana Pudding Cookies

I recently made these cookies for a ladies night I attended. One of the women asked me, “How many bananas did you have to put in this to get so much banana flavor?” My answer: None. Instead of using fresh bananas, this recipe uses banana pudding mix. Pudding mixes are a wonderful way to add lots of flavor without complicating the recipe.

What I love about this recipe, apart from the simplicity, is that you really do get all the flavors of banana pudding within the cookie. The strong banana flavor comes from the pudding mix. But the cookies also contain white chocolate, which brings the creaminess you’d find in banana pudding. And there are even chunks of vanilla wafers, so you get the nice crunch too.

This recipe calls for butter shortening. If you're not sure what this is, it can be found in the baking aisle of your grocery store, near the Crisco and cooking spray. It is a butter flavored shortening; I buy Crisco brand, but there may be others out there.

To make these cookies, start by creaming together the shortening, butter, sugars, vanilla, and eggs. This is most easily done using an electric stand mixer. Once these ingredients are all combined fully, the dry ingredients need to be added. I always find it best to mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Then, add a scoop of dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and allow the dry to start to incorporate before adding more. This prevents flour from flying up out of the bowl.

Next, we need to chop the vanilla wafers. I just used a cutting board and knife, and made medium-sized cookie pieces. I would recommend not using a food processor, because it will make more crumbs and less cookie pieces. Once the vanilla wafers are chopped, stir in the wafers and white chocolate chips. I like to do this part by hand so that the cookies don't break up even more.

Then, roll the dough into 1 or 1½ inch balls and place them on a greased baking sheet. A lot of time, I like to roll the balls by hand, because then I can control the amount of wafers and white chocolate. You don’t want a cookie that is majority white chocolate. But the dough is very sticky, so just be prepared for messy hands. Alternately, you could use cookie scoops. These allow for more consistently sized cookies, but it’s more difficult to control the white chocolate to wafer to cookie ratio.

Place the dough balls on a greased baking sheet, and bake for 9 minutes. The cookies will look very underdone, but they will firm up a little as they cool. I find it best to pull cookies out of the oven when they look underdone because we want nice, chewy cookies. And, even after removing them from the oven, cookies will continue to bake a little, because the pan is still hot. This is why it is always recommended to let cookies cool on the pan for just a minute or two, and then remove them to cool completely.