Healthy chocolate cookies

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a naturally healthy person. If I could I'd eat out for every meal of the day. When people struggle to finish a meal I find it bizarre- maybe my parents were just really strict with me finishing meals growing up, but even when I'm full I'll continue to eat. The other day I spent a good ten minutes contemplating what I'd do if I had to give up one of either cheese or chocolate, and I still didn't come to any resolution. You get the gist- I like food. For the past couple of years I've made very conscious efforts to improve my in-built bad eating habits and try to make better choices.
That's where these cookies come in; they don't contain any flour or butter, only have a tiny amount of sugar in, and are legitimately pretty healthy coming in at just over 100 calories each. Earlier today I realised we had an avocado which was about to get to the bad side of ripe but I wasn't in the mood for guacamole. Then I remembered I'd once seen a recipe for avocado cookies online so I went on a search to find it. My recipe is very heavily based on this one with minor adjustments. I'm a bit dubious about all these 'healthy' baking recipes doing the rounds at the moment- if you want a brownie surely you want it to taste like a brownie and not a sweet potato. But please, like me, give these cookies a second chance. The texture definitely isn't like a traditional cookie, more like a cross between a brownie and a cookie, but since when has that ever been a bad thing?

Ingredients:

• 1 ripe avocado
• 1 small-medium banana
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup caster sugar
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda/baking soda
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder; I used Bournville
• Chocolate chunks; I used about 70g of dark chocolate chunks
• A little sea salt

1.  Preheat your oven to gas mark 4/175 degrees celsius
2. Mash up your avocado flesh and banana in a bowl
3. Add your sugar and use a handheld electric whisk to mix it all up. In all honesty if you want to be extra virtuous you may not need this extra sugar but I wasn't sure if one banana would be enough to substitute what was meant to be half a cup of sugar.
4. Add the egg, give it another mix
5. Add the bicarb & cocoa powder and mix again
6. Using a wooden spoon, incorporate the chocolate chunks
7. Line a baking tray with baking paper, then spoon the mixture in blobs on to the tray- this recipe made 9 decent sized cookies. They hardly spread out at all so flatten them out a little with the spoon. 
8. Sprinkle a tiny bit of the salt over the tray- I like to do this with most cookies nowadays to make them a little less sickly
9. Bake for anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes. I set my timer for 10 minutes, at which point the cookies looked very shiny but weren't quite done. They'll never properly firm up as a traditional cookie would but keep checking them every couple of minutes until they hold their shape and you can lift it off the baking paper easily

That's it! If you can resist the temptation of a warm cookie with still-melted chocolate then you're a better person than I am, but even when cooled they have a very fudge-y lovely texture. Enjoy!