Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal Cookie Sandwiches

Kramer and I went to Asbury Park this weekend with the family and we had a fantastic time! It was so good to see everyone and to get out of the city for a while! The beach was beautiful and the weather was a welcome change from the heatwaves we’ve been experiencing here in New York! Kramer and I just relaxed on the beach, walking on the boardwalk and soaking up the sun. I, of course, got a bit sunburned, but no matter how hard I try, it always seems to be inevitable whenever I spend more than an hour or two in the sun. You can see a few photos of us hamming it up for the camera here, here, here, and here. I can’t wait for the next annual Kramer vacation in 2011!

I wanted to bring something a bit different into work aside from the old chocolate fall-backs, so I decided to do a special kind of peanut butter cookie. The cookies themselves are made with not only peanut butter, but oatmeal and banana. The peanut butter holds everything together with its sweet and salty crunchiness (I used crunchy peanut butter – my favorite), the banana offers a welcome compliment to the peanut buttery goodness, and the oats offer a bit of a chewy texture that work really well with the peanut butter-fluff frosting. You heard right! I had some marshmallow fluff sitting in my cupboard from the last time that I made my s’mores bars, and I wanted to do something with it before Kramer and I ate it all up, so on a whim, I threw it into the frosting mixture. I really loved the sticky, marshmallow taste and texture that the fluff added to the frosting; it was just a little something out of the ordinary! The cookies were absolutely perfect altogether, I thought. They are definitely for peanut butter lovers, and the variety of tastes and textures made them a hit both at work and at home. Perhaps the best part about these is that they are small sandwich cookies, so they make lots to bring to an event or into work, and they are already portioned into bite-sized pieces, so you don’t feel as if you’ve eaten too much of a good thing (although it’s hard not to).

Your ingredients.

Combine your flour, oats, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt in a medium sized bowl.

Beat together the butter, peanut butter, and sugar.

Mash up your bananas in a small bowl with a fork.

Beat in the egg and vanilla until combined.

Add in the flour mixture a bit at a time, alternating with the banana mixture, until just combined. Don’t over mix!

Add in a bit of the banana mixture, then the flour. You want to start and end with the flour.

Scoop about two teaspoons of dough onto a greased and/or lined baking sheet, and sprinkle with a bit of raw sugar, if you like (it’s completely optional). Bake at 350 degrees F for 10-12 minutes, until golden and still soft.

Allow to cool completely before making into sandwiches.

Beat together the frosting ingredients until you have achieved the consistency that you like.