Banana Oat Breakfast Cookies

These banana oat breakfast cookies are made without any flour, or processed sugar and make for an incredibly tasty snack! They are easily customizable, make a great grab and go breakfast and are just as good as a bowl of oatmeal but MUCH more satisfying.

Calling these “cookies” may be a bit of a stretch, but hear me out. Doesn’t calling them cookies make it feel more like a treat to eat these little oat nuggets? 

Maybe I’m just simple minded but it tricks me into thinking I’m getting something more decadent than an all out health bomb. Buuuttt, since these banana oat cookies are full of all the things your body craves, you can munch away and have two if you want. NBD. Not gonna lie, the ability to down more than one without any chagrin is a major plus in my book.

Moving on to banana oat cookies now… this might be one of the all out healthiest recipes I’ve ever made. Period. The cast of characters is shown below and only one didn’t make the shot (I forgot to include salt, oops). Nothing to hide here – its all good stuff!

Recipe Notes

One fun thing about this recipe is that you can easily swap out the pecans and cranberries for whatever else fits your fancy.

As written, these banana oat cookies are naturally vegan, but you can tweak to fit your preferences. I made a more decadent version with chocolate chips and coconut awhile back that was absolutely divine. Plug and play with whatever your favorite combos are.

One thing that’s important though is the age of your bananas – it is crucial in this recipe. The ones pictured above are a bit misleading because you really want to use banana bread bananas. You know, the ones with the brown spots that are more sugary and sweet? If you don’t use brown bananas, the cookies won’t be as sweet unless you add sugar and that defeats the whole purpose of a sugar free recipe.

Here’s a picture of what I’m talking about:

Now that we’re on the same page with that critical part of the recipe, let’s take a minute to go over how easy this recipe is. The instructions are basically, dump everything in a bowl and stir. No mixer needed, no separate bowls, just dump, stir, and bake.

This would be a great recipe to make with your kids for this reason. Easy and feels somewhat like a treat. With those selling points (maybe don’t mention that they’re good for you?), I don’t know any kid that would be able to resist baking a batch with you.

I baked mine for 18 minutes but earlier on in recipe testing, I baked for 15 minutes when I made 12 smaller cookies and that worked fine too. Just putting that out there in case you want to make some minis instead.

Notice how they don’t spread out much so you can put them pretty close together. This is helpful for making double batches when you’ve got a pile of brown bananas building up on the counter or in the freezer.

In putting this banana oat cookie recipe together (which was really a revamp of a recipe I posted in 2014), I realized how many brown banana recipes I have on this site. Its a serious collection guys. I seem to be a bit obsessed. My favorites are the banana coconut bread, peanut butter banana muffins, chocolate zucchini banana bread, zucchini cookies, and these chocolate peanut butter cupcakes. And I’ve probably concocted a dozen more banana recipes that I haven’t shared yet. Would it be helpful to have these compiled somewhere for you? Let me know banana lovers.

I just love being able to leverage the sweetness of brown bananas to use less or no sugar in a recipe. Its a beautiful thing.

In closing, I really hope this recipe becomes a go-to for you like it is for me. Thank your body for everything it does for you and nourish it accordingly with these tasty little morsels.