Food Friday: Power Cookie Bites

When I was shopping at Winco in their bulk section, I saw some dried mango slices.  Right beside them was a packet of recipes.  The top one was for Power Cookies.  I am always looking for recipes without a lot of unhealthy-sounding ingredients.  This recipe had all the markings of a winner.  When I made it, I felt it was a good one.  Most cookies you can eat yourself sick on, but this one is satisfying with eating  only one cookie, especially if you eat tiny bites.

Power Cookie Bites

4 cups old-fashioned oatmeal
15 ounces cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped pitted dates
1/2 cup flaked coconut
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1/2 cup chopped mango
1/2 cup mini M and M's

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F . Grease cookie sheets or use a silpat mat or cover with parchment paper.  Grind the oats in a blender until resembling coarse flour.

In a medium bowl, mash the beans into a smooth paste.  Use a fork.  Stir in the white granulated sugar, brown sugar, and the vanilla until well blended.  Combine the ground oats, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon; blend into the bean mixture.  Stir in the dates, coconut, raisins, mangos, mini M and M's, and nuts.  Drop dough by heaping spoonfuls onto prepared cookie pan.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until golden.  Cool on pan for 5 minutes before moving to a cool rack to cool completely.

My oven took closer to 20 minutes to cook before they turned sort of golden. I really wanted to cook them longer to get a better color but thought they might be too dry, so I did not.

This is a close-up of the Power Cookie Bites.  After they were cool, I put them in a tightly-covered container.  In the morning they were almost chewy, which was something I appreciate in a cookie.  They had seemed a little dry right out of the oven.  I would make these again.

By the way, the M and M's were not in the original recipe but I thought they would add a bit of color to the cookies plus I am trying to use up as much food as we can before the end of our mission, which is now staring us in the face making us treasure every moment and every experience.

Another note: for an experiment I am going to go back to Winco and see if they have oat flour and use that for one batch of cookies.  I will need to blend up the 4 cups of old-fashioned oats and measure the resulting oat flour to see how much already-ground-oatmeal-into-flour so I will know how much to use.   I know not everyone has a blender.  Or a food processor, which I also think would work to grind the oatmeal.

I guess this means I will be making 2 more batches of these cookies....I only have 1/2 cup additional mangos from the last purchase so I will probably use up some Craisins or go heavier on the mini M and M's or add some mini chocolate chips.  Now we are getting into closer to not-so-healthy cookies, but in the interests of using up....

UPDATE:  If you don't have a blender or a high speed blender to grind the oatmeal into flour,  use 3 1/2 cups of oat flour that you can by already ground up.