Tuesday, January 20, 2009
So this week was my week for Goody Club....a Wednesday rotation of dessert-bringing amongst members of different labs. It's enough to satisfy even a sweet-tooth like mine. I worked on these Samoas, a home-made version of the strangely addictive Girl Scout cookie. For those of you who haven't had one recently (tsk tsk) it is essentially a basic butter cookie cut into a doughnut shape, topped with caramel-covered coconut, and dipped/drizzled with chocolate. They're like the cookie cousin to Amanda's crack muffins.
I'm not gonna lie, these cookies took a lot of work. I had to gerry-rig a cookie cutter that was 1.5 inches across, and make a whole in the center (I ended up with the cap from my can of PAM and the top from my vanilla extract). Then after baking the cookies, the coconut had to be toasted for 20 minutes. Then the topping had to be made, and applied to cool cookies(no easy task, it was super sticky, and kept burning my fingers), and the cookies had to be both dipped and drizzled with chocolate. Well, they didn't *have* to be, but I always bake with flourish.
Of course, all of the attention they required was worth it, because these cookies are straight-up delicious. I know A is considering making this recipe for J, so here's my thoughts on improvements--I wish I had used better quality chocolate. I used store-brand chocolate chips (I wasn't going to get the good stuff just to give it away to a bunch of science nerds!), but the chocolate really is a dominant force when you first taste of the cookie. The caramel and coconut notes come in a second or so later. The recipe called for dark chocolate (yum!) but I just used semi-sweet. I thought the regular Kraft soft caramels worked fine, but if you can find another better quality soft caramel, its probably worth investing there as well. And make sure you have 2 hours or so to devote to making this cookie, because it needs it. If you wanted to be smart about it, you could toast the coconut and bake the cookies one night, then let them cool overnight and do the caramel/chocolate flourishing the next day.
You can find a link for this recipe, as well as other homemade Girl Scout knockoffs (yay for Thin Mints!) here.
3 comments:
Cool! I think I'll try these out this weekend!!! :-)
Ok, so I have to admit, Jason and I tried making these over the past weekend thinking we could take them to the SuperBowl party...and, well, we liked them too much to share, so we ate them all ourselves. Yes, embarassing I know. They're really good though. We took a few short cuts. For one thing, we skipped cutting a hole in the middle and just made round cookies. We also ditched cookie cutters altogether and just rolled up balls of dough and then flattened them into circles on the cookie sheet. They came out great! Thanks again for the recipe Laura!!
Haha, yes sharing is overrated. I also saw on Baking Bites that the same recipe can be adapted for Bar form, which is probably just as easy as flattening out the balls of dough. I would do it that way when I do it again :)
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