Oatmeal Banana Cookies

When I first started this blog, my goal was to showcase the Portuguese cooking that I miss so much. But this blog turns out to showcase as well the evolution of my food interests and discovery of new ingredients and flavors. For example, I had never even heard about quinoa until I came to Singapore, now it´s one of my favourite ingredients, I could have it every day. I had never used lime (Portuguese cuisine only uses lemon) or simply hated oats. I thought they were tasteless and boring. Now, not only I won´t go out of the house in the morning without having a nice bowl of it, but also keep searching and trying new recipes with oats.

So today I made oatmeal banana cookies and, honestly, these were the best homemade cookies I have ever made and eaten in my life. It has just the right flavours I love.

Ingredients

100 gr of oats
75g of flour
80 gr of light brown sugar
1 tea spoon of baking powder
1 tea spoon of cinnamon
1 large or 2 small ripped bananas
20 gr of olive oil
1 tea spoon of vanilla essence
Dark chocolate chips (optional -  I have no choice but to use them, my son loves chocolate!)

Preparation

Turn on the oven at 180º.

Combine the oats, flour, sugar, baking powder and cinnamon.

On a plate, smash the banana using a fork and add on the olive oil and vanilla. Incorporate this mix into the oats still using the fork, as if you were still smashing the banana. That´s how you´ll be able to blend everything together. Takes about 2 minutes. Then add the chocolate chip, 2 table spoons are more than enough.

After 15 minutes in the oven, the cookies are ready to be savored!

Wholemeal Scones with Chocolate

After posting a photo of scones I made yesterday and getting positive feedback, here I am to share the recipe... and back to blogging. In 3 months, since the birth of my baby, I have been away from writing here on here, not from cooking though. I have tons of writing to catch up on!

I´ve been following this recipe for a couple of years, but this time around I decided to give a try to wholemeal flour. The result: spectacular! Thanks to the gestational diabetes I learned a lot about food and triggered main changes in our family diet, being one of them a bigger consumption of dark flours rather than the white ones.

This is a super simple recipe that I´m sure you´ll love!

Ingredients

- 500 gr flour (250 gr of wholemeal flour and 250 gr of plain white flour. You can only use the white flour if you prefer, just as amazing!) 

- 5 tbs of sugar

- 1 ts of salt

- 50 gr o butter

- 1 cup of milk

- 1 egg

- 1 tbs of baking powder

- hand full of chocolate chips - this is totally optional and you may want to replace the chocolate by other ingredients such as raisins, dried cranberries or nuts

Preparation

1 - Pre-heat the oven at 200º.

2 - In a pan, melt the butter in the milk.

3 - In a bowl, put all the other ingredients, except the chocolate chips, and little by little pour in the milk and butter mixture. Kneed the dough and finally add the chocolate and mix with your hand.  

4 - Cover a baking tray with the baking paper and make medium-sized balls with your hand or with a table spoon.

5 - Pop it into the oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Don´t let the scones overcook, or they will become dry.

Enjoy!