Make Your Own Thin Mints When The Girl Scouts Aren't Around

Like other delicacies such as the McRib and eggnog, Girl Scout cookies only come around every so often, leaving you to spend your time craving them in abject misery. But anyone with a cookie sheet and the ability to follow directions can easily make the latter for themselves.

Seattle Weekly cracks the code to deliver recipes for several varieties of Girl Scout cookies. You can enjoy them yourself or don a sash and take some batches door-to-door to undersell those price-gouging little girls. (Not really, we’re just kidding. Don’t do that.):

Here’s the “Homemade Thin Mints” recipe, with ingredients first:

1/2 cup of butter (softened)
1/4 tsp of salt
1 cup of white sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp of mint extract
1/2 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder
3 squares of semisweet chocolate (chopped)
1/4 cup of butter

Begin by preheating the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the sugar and softened butter until the mixture is creamy, then beat in the egg and add the mint extract. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa, and salt. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture.

At this point, my friends and I deviated from the online recipe. The recipe directed us to refrigerate the dough for about five hours. We had no such time, so we left it in for about 40 minutes while we watched an episode of Jersey Shore online. Perhaps this is the reason our cookies did not taste exactly like Girl Scout cookies.

Roll out the dough until it’s 1/4 of an inch thick. Use a round cookie-cutter to form the cookies, then toss them in the oven for about 12 minutes. When the cookies are baked, melt 1/4 of a cup of butter (or about half of a stick) together with the chocolate in the microwave or on the stovetop. Dip the cookies in the melted mixture and set them on wax paper until the chocolate hardens.

This recipe makes about four dozen cookies.

If you’ve ever tried to bake your own Girl Scout cookies, let us know how they turned out.

Make Girl Scout Cookies at Home! [Seattle Weekly]

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