Yellow Banana Pudding Cookies 💛

The trendy resurgence of "trash," in baking has been underway for many years. Cereal milk, reverence for the virtues of imitation vanilla, homemade twinkies, and other gourmet reimaginings of the mass-produced junk food sweets from the 30's to the 00's are great examples of this. There's one unabashedly fake flavor that this prestige-kitsch trend has overlooked, though. Banana.

Real banana doesn't work in this recipe. It's too mild. You need the strong artificial flavor you can only find in unadulterated isoamyl acetate. Luckily, instant banana pudding mix is full of the stuff. Adding pudding mix to your cookie dough - much like cake batter - is not only a classic kitschy home baking move, it also helps to make these cookies perfectly soft inside and structurally sound enough on the outside to be made in sizes ranging from 1 ounce to 8 ounces without a problem.

Ingredients

• 8 oz Unsalted Butter, softened
• 5.5 oz Light Brown Sugar
• 1.5 oz Granulated White Sugar
• 3.4 oz Instant Banana Pudding Mix
• 2 Large Eggs
• 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
• 1/8 tsp freshly grated Nutmeg
• 10.5 oz All-Purpose Flour
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 1 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt
• 1 cup chopped Nilla Wafers (3oz)
• 1.5 cups White Chocolate Chips (10oz)

Directions

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and line a baking sheet with parchment.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugars on medium speed briefly.
3. Add pudding mix, eggs, vanilla, and nutmeg to the mixer, and mix on low speed until smooth and completely blended.
4. Turn off your mixer, and add the flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix on low speed to moisten the flour, and continue until a few streaks of unincorporated flour remain.
5. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the wafers and white chocolate chips by hand. Doing this in the mixer will pulverize the wafers into breadcrumbs, which will suck the moisture out of the dough and give you crumbly cookies, so do this by hand.

For Normal Sized Cookies (1.5oz)

1. Drop 1.5 oz portions on the lined baking sheet. You should have space for 12 portions on the sheet. Bake for 10 minutes until slightly golden and set. Cool on sheet for 2 minutes then transfer to rack.

For Bigger Cookies (3oz)

1. Drop 3oz portions into a large freezer bag and chill in the freezer for 30 minutes. While they chill, preheat your oven to 400°F. Once the portioned dough has chilled, remove 6 portions from the freezer and evenly space on your lined baking sheet. Bake for 10-14 minutes until set around the edges and dry on top, but still steamy in the middle. Allow to cool completely on the pan before baking the next batch of 6 cookies.