Fluffy Vegan Banana Bread Cookies (Gluten Free and Sugar Free Options)

Satisfy your banana bread cravings AND your cookie cravings with one perfect treat!  These vegan banana bread cookies are soft and fluffy, can be filled with chocolate chips or nuts, and are the best way to eat bananas in your baked goods!

I have a habit of buying bananas to be healthy, then watching them get more and more brown on the counter, and then trying to figure out what to bake them into before I’ve fully lost them to the ripening heavens. 

Please tell me I’m not the only one.

Like many people, I absolutely love banana bread.  But I don’t always want to make a full loaf of bread to get my banana goodies fix.  Hence – the banana bread cookie!!  These vegan banana bread cookies are soft, banana-y, flavored with cinnamon, and fluffy on the inside just like your favorite banana bread.  They can hold up fully on their own, or you can fill them with chocolate chips or chopped nuts.  They’re incredibly easy to make, and will leave you wishing you had even more ripe and wasting away bananas to make another batch!

How To Make Them

Start off by mashing your bananas.  I find that 2 large ripe bananas (or 2-3 medium bananas) will give me almost exactly the desired amount here, which is a cup of mashed banana.  You can leave a little bit of texture in it, but get it fairly smooth.

Then add in neutral oil, granulated sugar (see the Ingredients Needed section to learn how to make these sugar free!), and vanilla extract, and combine fully with the banana.  After that, mix in the dry ingredients with a spatula or spoon.  At this point, you will likely be confused because this cookie dough resembles something more like muffin batter.  Don’t worry, this is correct!  If you want to add chocolate chips or chopped nuts, mix those in at this time too.  I find it can hold around ½ – ¾ cup mix-ins, plus I put some extra chips on top for fun. 

Cover your dough, and let it sit on the counter for 60 minutes!  If you bake them immediately, they will be delicious but fairly flat.  Letting the batter sit allows it to thicken a bit, and that’s what produces the thick and fluffy texture you are looking for out of these.

Once they’ve rested, scoop the dough into large 2-tbsp sized scoops, and drop onto a parchment paper lined pan.  You will get around 17-18 cookies.  I like to shape the dough a bit with my finger to make it circular, since the loose nature of the batter means they won’t naturally shape themselves into dough circles like most other cookies. 

They bake for 9-12 minutes at 350 degrees, then will need about 10 minutes to sit on the pan before moving to a cooling rack.  9 minutes will give you a very soft cookie, which is my personal favorite consistency with these, but it is VERY soft. 11-12 will harden more around the edges and be more like cookie you are used to. If you do take them out more in the 9-10 minute zone, they should be soft enough to shape them into circles using a mason jar lid or large cookie cutter, which is how to get the perfectly shaped cookies you see in the photos here. 11-12 minutes they may not shape as easily. Either way you like them, this is your final step! Time to eat your vegan banana bread cookies!!

Just an FYI – these cookies will always be a little bit sticky, even when dry.

Nutritional info can be found in the Notes section below the recipe instructions.

Storage:

After they have cooled, seal in an air-tight container and store at room temperature.  These cookies are magic and will continue tasting great for nearly a week.

Pro tips and tools:

• Make sure you are measuring your flour either by weight or using the spoon and level method.  Do not scoop directly from the container, as you will wind up with too much! This is so important! If you want to buy a pre-made gluten free flour blend, make sure it’s King Arthur’s Measure for Measure Gluten Free Flour, it is BY FAR the best one for my recipes, NOT Bob’s Red Mills or any others. If you want to make a homemade blend, here is a link to the one I use.
• This tip goes for all cookie recipes – if it is your first time trying a new cookie recipe, if you have the time, I always suggest baking one cookie first before putting the full batch in the oven.  That way if something is not working right for your batch, you can adjust before you’ve wasted all the dough.  If it spreads too much, adding a little more flour is usually a safe fix.  If it’s too dry and not spreading at all, it may need some more liquid ingredients, in this case neutral oil.
• I always keep a large round cookie cutter or a mason jar lid next to my oven, that way when the cookies come out if they are misshapen I can quickly use the round lid to help reshape the dough before it has firmed up. This is also a good time to push a few more chips into the top of the cookie if you so desire.

Ingredients needed:

• Bananas
• Neutral oil – any will work, I usually use grapeseed.
• Vanilla extract
• Granulated sugar – If you want to make these sugar free, I love using this Monkfruit Sweetener in place of granulated sugar.
• Flour – Make sure you are measuring your flour either by weight or using the spoon and level method.  Do not scoop directly from the container, as you will wind up with too much! This is so important! If you want to buy a pre-made gluten free flour blend, make sure it’s King Arthur’s Measure for Measure Gluten Free Flour, it is BY FAR the best one for my recipes, NOT Bob’s Red Mills or any others. If you want to make a homemade blend, here is a link to the one I use.
• Baking powder – I recommend using baking powder that has no added aluminum. This one is my go-to.
• Baking soda
• Salt
• Cinnamon
• Chocolate chips and/or chopped nuts – optional mix-ins

What To Bake Next:

• Want more chocolate chip cookie options? Try these Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies, or these Vegan Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies.
• Have some bananas to use up? Try this Vegan Marbled Banana Bread, or these Vegan Banana Pancakes, or these Vegan Peanut Butter Banana Muffins.
• Want more FUN breakfast options? Try these Vegan Copycat Entenmann’s Donuts, or these Vegan Lemon Blueberry Scones.