How To: Why You Should Eat Cookies for Breakfast

Cookies for breakfast seem like a clear dietary no-no, but these three-ingredient breakfast cookies are easy, healthy, portable, and can be made in advance. They're also dairy-free, egg-free, and have no added processed sugar, so they can also be called allergy-friendly cookies. If you use gluten-free quick oats in this recipe, they are also gluten-free breakfast cookies!

Besides all of those reasons, these cookies are only about 50 calories each when they're made with just the original three ingredients. Nutritionists say that the average healthy breakfast is between 250 and 500 calories, so you should feel free to enjoy more than a few of these. Eat them with some fruit or yogurt and your morning coffee or tea, and you have a yummy meal with some serious staying power.

How to Make 3-Ingredient Breakfast Cookies (Makes 8-12 Cookies)

Ingredients:

• 2 very ripe bananas
• 1 cup applesauce
• 1.5 cups quick oats

Optional cookie additions:

• 1 tsp vanilla
• Chocolate chunks or chips
• Dried cranberries, blueberries, or raisins
• Nuts
• Sunflower seeds
• Stevia
• Honey
• Cinnamon
• Peanut butter or almond butter
• Fresh blueberries or strawberries

Instructions:

1. In a mixing bowl, mash the bananas with a spoon.
2. When bananas get smooth and creamy, mix with applesauce and quick oats.
3. Let the batter sit for at least 10 minutes.
4. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
5. Drop spoonfuls of batter onto the sheet, about two inches apart.

6. Back at 350 degrees for 12-18 minutes, or until they're set to your liking.

Tips for Making Breakfast Cookies:

• You can't substitute regular oats or steel cut oats in this breakfast cookie recipe. If you do, the consistency will suffer. Use quick-cooking oats.
• Use the ripest bananas you can find or have in your house. Very ripe bananas will make these cookies ooze with naturally sweetness. If you don't use ripe bananas, your breakfast cookies might need some honey or stevia.
• For a breakfast cookie with some protein power, add 1-2 tablespoons of peanut butter or almond butter and/or some nuts.
• Because you can safely eat the cookie batter before you cook it, since it contains no raw eggs, you should taste the batter after you are done mixing it. If it needs some sweetness or flavor, consider adding some honey, stevia, or vanilla before it goes into the oven.

• My favorite add-ins are vanilla, chocolate chunks, and fresh or dried blueberries.
• You can make and freeze these in advance. They thaw nicely and stay good for over a week if stored in the refrigerator.
• Despite their name, these are also really good as a portable snack or a guilt-free dessert.

No-Bake Chocolate & Oatmeal Cookies

Want more? These no-bake breakfast cookies are done in a flash. After you heat up some butter, sugar, milk, and cocoa on the stove, you mix in some peanut butter, vanilla extract, and quick-cooking oats. Remove from heat, shape into cookies, let them cool on some wax paper, and you're done.

Not-Quite-Breakfast-Cookie Cookies

These delicious morsels from Ellie Krieger are more regular cookie than a whole foods breakfast, but the addition of carrot, oats, and bran flakes gives you more fiber, nutrients, and vitamins than you'd get in your everyday cookie.

More Cookie Hacks!

For lazy bakers, check out this guide to making cookies using cake mix, or try these decadent cookies stuffed with Reese's peanut butter cups. If you want to make regular ol' dessert cookies, check out the effortless secret to making perfect cookies or the one thing you should do for perfect chocolate chip cookies.