Cooking Old 9th Ward Recipes: Chocolate Banana Drop Cookies

Today I decided to try to make another recipe from the 1965 ward carnival cookbook. I was craving something sweet, so I decided to try out one of the cookie recipes. A lot of the cookies sounded really good, and I was excited because there were a lot of types of cookies that I had never heard of before. In the end, I decided to make the chocolate banana drop cookies with banana frosting, submitted by Sister Janice McIlrath.  I really love chocolate and banana together, so I was pretty excited. 

When reading through the recipe, there were a few things that I wasn’t sure about. The recipe calls for 1.5 squares of baking chocolate, and a half a square of baking chocolate for the frosting. I wasn’t sure how much it meant by a square, so I looked it up to see if there was an exact measurement. The most common answer I found was that one square of baking chocolate is equal to one ounce, so that was the measurement I used for this recipe (as we will see further on in this post, I’m not sure that was correct).

I’m not sure if this is just me, but I had  also never heard of drop cookies before. Since the cookbook had quite a few cookies with that description, I had to look up what that meant. As it turns out, it’s all in the description. Drop cookies simply mean that you can drop the spoonful of cookie batter onto the cookie pan, and it’s ready to bake–no need to roll them. So I’ve actually made a lot of drop cookies before, I had just never heard them referred to by this name. 

To start off, I gathered all of my ingredients together. I had never bought dry milk solids before, so I was excited to cook with it. The recipe didn’t specify which kind of chopped nuts to use, so I ended up using macadamia nuts since they are my favorite. For the baking chocolate, I used Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate. 

Once I had all the ingredients together, I started on the recipe. I began by sifting together the dry ingredients.

Then I mixed together the other ingredients, before adding them to the sifted ingredients. 

Once I had all the ingredients combined, I was a little surprised because I thought the batter would be more chocolatey. So I may have used the wrong measurement for the chocolate, or the cookies just weren't as chocolatey as I’d hoped. 

After I had the batter all ready, I dropped the cookies onto the cookie sheet like I’d been instructed, and baked them for 13 minutes. For the first batch of cookies, I accidentally made the cookie drops too large, so the cookies came out a lot bigger than I would have preferred. So for the remaining batches, I made sure to keep the batter amounts smaller when I dropped them onto the tray.

They came out looking pretty good!

While the cookies cooled, I started on the frosting. First, I mashed the banana. My banana was really ripe, which I think added to the taste of the frosting and made it really easy to mash. 

After the banana was mashed, I melted the chocolate and butter together, and sifted in the powdered sugar. Then I added the banana and milk. The recipe cautions to use less milk if you’re using a real banana instead of banana extract. I didn’t notice this the first time I tried to make the frosting, and so I added 3 tablespoons of milk. I ended up making some really tasty banana syrup, but it was too runny to be frosting, so I had to try again. The second time, I only did 1 tablespoon of milk, and the results were much better. 

The frosting tasted really good, and the banana flavor came through really nicely. I like really sweet things, so this was perfect for me. Once it cooled, I spread it on the cookies, and the recipe was complete. 

These cookies were pretty good! My favorite part was the frosting. I will definitely use it for other recipes in the future. Even though the cookies tasted good, they weren’t my favorite. I was hoping they’d be really chocolatey to go with the strong banana taste of the frosting, and they turned out to have hardly any chocolate taste at all. I’m not sure if the cookies were just supposed to be this way, or I messed up. However, they still tasted pretty good–just sort of plain. Most of the sweetness and strong flavor came from the banana frosting. Overall, I’d give the frosting recipe a 9/10, and the cookie recipe a 6/10. (Once again, this may just be because I didn’t understand how they measured things in the recipe, and because I prefer cookies that are very sweet.) These were so fun to make!