Brown Butter Banana Bread Chocolate Chip Cookies

Luscious, gooey-in-the-middle brown butter chocolate chip cookies with a banana twist, making them taste like a combination of your favorite chocolate chip cookie and a slice of freshly baked, still-warm banana bread. It’s the perfect recipe to use up that sad single banana languishing on the countertop (you only need a single egg yolk too!)

With a deep and nutty flavor from the brown butter, a hearty kick of banana flavor, and studded with a mix of semisweet and dark chocolate pieces that melt into luscious puddles of molten chocolate in the oven, these lengthily-named cookies will become a fast favorite.

So we’ve done BBCCCs (brown butter chocolate chip cookies), but what about BBBBCCCs (brown butter BANANA BREAD chocolate chip cookies)? Indeed, adding a banana to my favorite cookie recipe makes for a cookie that tastes like a perfect mashup between chocolate chip cookies and banana bread.

The idea for this recipe came about when Taylor — who has a banana every morning for breakfast — somehow wound up with an extra banana that quickly turned (let’s just say he likes his bananas medium rare, even a speck of brown and he won’t touch it). I couldn’t very well let that sad, lonely banana go to waste, but given that it was just a single banana, it wasn’t quite enough to make a loaf of banana bread or even my banana bread muffins, at least without more math than my morning brain was willing to do.

But I figured banana cookies sounded pretty good, so why not?

Turns out you can’t just go adding banana to cookie recipes willy-nilly though. Since bananas have a high water content, simply adding banana will lead to puffy, cakey cookies. And I, for one, am not a fan of cakey cookies (whoopie pies being the one and only exception).

To make up for the extra water content, I removed the whole egg, leaving just egg yolk, and removed the splash of milk as well (the banana more than makes up for the water lost while browning the butter, which is why the milk is there to begin with). A single egg yolk combined with the equivalent of one small banana is enough to give these cookies a fudgy, toothsome, and borderline-gooey texture that is anything but cakey.

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10 Pantry Ingredients to Level-Up Your Baking

I’ve been baking all my life, and developing my own recipes for the last 15 years, and during that time have learned and developed a few tricks and secret ingredients to level-up homemade treats, taking them from good to downright extraordinary.

I’m not one for keeping secrets, so I’m here to spill the beans on these 10 (no longer) secret ingredients that will make your bakes look and taste more like professional, bakery-made treats. Plus, they can all be stored in the pantry for months and even years.

You may have noticed one or more of these ingredients listed as optional in many of my recipes. While their omission won’t necessarily cause the recipe to fail, they are included in the recipe for a reason, usually to level-up the recipe by enhancing the flavor, texture, and/or appearance.

Sometimes I’ll utilize a few of these secret ingredients together at once (like my next-level brown butter chocolate chip cookies which feature dry milk powder, instant espresso powder, flaky sea salt, AND good chocolate). While one of these things on its own might not be super apparent in the final product, together they make for some of the best cookies I’ve ever made (and I don’t say that lightly!)

Just a heads up that some of these ingredients won’t be available in your local supermarket, so it does take a bit of foresight and planning to acquire them online or from a specialty baking supply store (and I’ve included links to the products I use where appropriate). But they are all long lasting and shelf stable in your pantry, so they’ll keep beautifully for a year or more, giving you plenty of opportunity to put them to good use!

(Note this post contains affiliate links.)

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Chewy Crinkle-Top Brownie Cookies

Everything you love about a chewy, fudgy brownie in cookie form! With a double dose of chocolate in the form of melted semisweet chocolate and Dutch-process cocoa powder, and a hint of espresso powder to deepen the chocolate flavor even more, these (no chill!) chewy chocolate brownie cookies come out of the oven with paper-thin, shiny, crinkly tops. A sprinkle of flaky sea salt is the perfect finish.

While you can opt to make larger cookies if you prefer, I like a smaller size (about 2.5-inches diameter). That paired with the soft texture makes them perfect sandwich cookies (might I suggest some mint chip ice cream?) though they are plenty satisfying on their own as well.

The recipe is similar to my chocolate raspberry sandwich cookies, with slightly tweaked proportions and ingredients to produce that shiny, crackly top that’s one of the signature features of perfect brownies.

The smaller size and flat shape, not to mention the soft and chewy texture, make them an excellent base for cookie sandwiches. Might I suggest a rich chocolate ganache and jam filling, or maybe this pistachio white chocolate ganache (yes please!)

Or, better yet smash a scoop of homemade mint chip ice cream between two of these cookies and thank me later. The softness of these cookies makes them particularly suitable for ice cream sandwiches since the soft cookie won’t cause the ice cream to squish out when you bite it.

These cookies are rich and fudgy like a brownie, but thin and chewy like a cookie, with that iconic shiny, crackly crust that you expect from the perfect brownie. Not too sweet either, with a balanced sweetness that contrasts beautifully with the deep chocolate flavor and the flake salt on top.

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