Fans of the Girl Scout’s Do-si-do cookies, also known as Peanut Butter Sandwiches, will notice some similarities between them and these  Toffee Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies. They look similar and both have a great peanut butter flavor to them. The signature element of those cookies is their light, crisp texture. These are chewier, making them a little more substantial, and I think they have an even better peanut butter flavor.

These peanut butter cookies have two ingredients that set them apart from your average peanut butter cookie: oatmeal and toffee. A little bit of quick cooking oatmeal in the cookie dough helps these cookies to bake up to be slightly thinner than your average peanut butter cookie, as well as a bit more tender. It also gives them a little bit of extra flavor. The toffee contributes a lot of flavor as well. Because it is finely chopped before being incorporated, it really almost melts into the cookies. When fresh from the oven, these cookies are tender and crisp around the edges, with a chewy center.

I sandwiched the cookies together with creamy peanut butter. The end result is a great combination of salty and sweet. That said, I must admit that the cookies are good on their own even without the filling!

These cookies are done when their edges start to turn golden brown. It may be tempting to overbake these cookies because they will look a little bit pale in the center when they’re golden on the edge, but overbaking them will only take away their chewiness.

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Girl Scout cookies come and go, and not every cookie recipe makes it to the cookie booths every spring. Lemon coolers are a retired Girl Scout cookie that many lemon-lovers have fond memories of. Unfortunately, memories are all that they have because these cookies aren’t offered in this year’s line-up. I liked the bright, lemony flavor of these cookies too and also appreciated the fact that they were a little different than the rest of the Girl Scout’s offerings. I wanted to try and give them the same treatment as some of my other favorite Girl Scout cookies and come up with a homemade version.

There was one big problem with this plan: my memory of the cookies - along with a photo of a Lemon Coolers box  - were all I had to go on when creating the recipe. My memory was of a crisp, tender cookie that was lemony and coated with confectioners’ sugar. I remember it having a much lighter texture than, say, a shortbread cookie and I also recall that it was fairly sturdy, not crumbly. So, my interpretation is based on this template. I will admit that if you pulled out a 12 year old box of Girl Scout cookies to compare these to, they might not be twins, but they’re definitely going to satisfy a craving for a crisp lemon cookie and match the look of the originals.

I used cake flour with a very little bit of cornstarch mixed in to give these their light texture. They’re softer than shortbread, but still have a nice crispness to them when you take a bite. I used real butter, which the original cookies probably did not, but I opted to use lemon extract (lemon oil is also a very good choice) instead of fresh lemon zest because that is closer to the flavor I remember in the originals. To give them that lemon-slice shape, I formed the dough into a log, chilled it, then sliced it in half before cutting the individual cookies. This made it very easy to shape them all and ensured that they all came out to the same size.

These cookies turned out to be very close to what I was looking for in a faux Girl Scout Cookie. They are slightly sweet and have a nice lemony flavor to them. I baked them just until the edges turned golden, which make for a crisp-tender cookie, and generously dusted them with confectioners sugar while they were still slightly warm. They kept well for several days without loosing their taste or texture, but they were so light that they were easy to eat two at a time.
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A few years ago, the idea of adding salt as an accent flavor to a dessert - in addition to just having a pinch in with the ingredients - was new and exciting. Now, it’s a lot more common to find salt in slightly unexpected places, such as sprinkled on top of cookies and caramels in a much more obvious way than ever before. I’ve also seen salt blended into a bars of chocolate. I saw a handful of bars like these a year or so ago - very gourmet items with a premium price - but have seen the combination much more frequently. A coffee shop I like (the Los Angeles based Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf) is now selling their own brand of salted dark chocolate that you can pick up with your morning latte.

I did pick up a couple of these bars recently, but not just to eat. No, I picked them up to bake with them. The dark chocolate is creamy and smooth, with a rich cocoa flavor and berry notes. It also has noticeable specks of sea salt sprinkled throughout that infuse the bar with a hit of salt when they melt on your tongue. I figured that the chocolate bars would be delicious in cookies, where that saltiness would serve to set off the sugars in the cookie dough as well as the sugar in the chocolate.

The cookies turned out beautifully. They’re crisp on the edges and chewy in the center. I added some ground oats to the cookies to help keep them moist and preserve that chewiness even after keeping them for a couple of days. The salt in the chocolate adds a nice savory - and definitely unexpected - twist to these cookies, too.

If you can’t find a bar of salted chocolate, dark or milk, you can still make these cookies. Pick up your favorite dark chocolate and chop it into chunks. Stir them into the cookies along with 1/4 tsp sea salt (fairly coarse, but not like rock salt). Add the salt with the chocolate so that the grains don’t dissolve into the dough when you mix them in. This way, you’ll get that same small hit of salt as you much your way through the cookie.
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Alfajores are a type of small cookie that is found in Latin America, where two plain cookies sandwich a layer of dulce de leche. The cookies are then often sprinkled with powdered sugar or rolled in a bit of shredded coconut to finish them off. As it is with so many cookies and cakes, there are many ways to make alfajores. Some are very cake-like, while others pack in so much dulce de leche filling that they verge on being candies. Still others use different fillings than the traditional dulce de leche for some variety. I’ve had a few variations, but the simpler renditions always appeal to me. I like a butter cookie with a generous spread of dulce de leche inside, and perhaps a bit of shredded coconut rolled around the edges when I have some handy.

These cookies are simple butter cookies, with a hint of vanilla added to them. They’re very tender, with a lovely buttery flavor to them, and they take on a nice chewiness once they’ve been filled with the dulce de leche. They’re quick and easy to make because, although they are sandwich cookies, the dough is simply dropped onto the baking sheet and left to spread during baking, not rolled out or sliced. That said, because you’re not using a cookie cutter to get the sizes exact, try to make sure that each ball of dough you put onto the baking sheet is about the same size.

For the filling, you can use homemade dulce de leche or store-bought. The amount that you use will vary by exactly how much filling you want inside your cookies (I like a moderate amount, but others like to pile it in!). Keep in mind that it may ooze out the sides of the cookies a bit if the dulce de leche is on the thin side, so don’t quite spread the filling to the edge of the cookies. If it does run out, roll the edges of the cookies in some shredded coconut to add a little more flavor and help keep that filling in place.
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Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are great because they deliver all the chocolate and all the buttery flavor of a regular chocolate chip cookie, with a little bit more texture and a delicious oaty, nutty flavor on top. When you toast nuts, you bring out their nuttiness even more, and this same thing works on oats. So, I added some toasted, sweetened granola right into this batch of cookies where I might have otherwise just used oatmeal. I got cookies that delivered even more flavor than before.

The cookies are thick and seem hearty, because of the granola. They are slightly chewy and crisp on the outside. You can definitely taste the flavors from the granola, whether yours is sweetened with maple syrup, honey or sugar, in the cookies, too.

I just used a plain granola (Cascadian Farms Organic Oats and Honey, to be specific), without any added nuts or dried fruits, so that I could really find the granola flavor in the finished cookies. I added in chocolate chips and chopped, toasted pecans separately. You can use just about any type of granola you like in these, whether it has nuts or dried fruits already added. The only thing you need to do to prep your granola is to chop it into small pieces - chocolate chip or almond sized clusters - before mixing it in so that you get an even distribution of granola throughout the cookies.
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Whoopie pies are a classic snack cake - despite the name that makes it sound like some sort of practical joke (like a whoopie cushion). They’re two soft cookies sandwiched together with a creamy filling. The standard whoopie pie has a chocolate cookie and a vanilla cream center. As good as this combination is, there is no harm in switching things up a little, right?

These are reverse whoopie pies, made with a vanilla cookie and a chocolate cream filling. The chocolate filling makes them seem a little bit richer than the classic pies. The cookies are very soft and cake-like, so eating the whoopie pie is almost like eating a cupcake where the frosting is in the center.

The pies are easy to make. Simply dollop the batter onto a baking sheet, as you would with regular cookies, then allow them to cool completely before making the chocolate cream filling. Try to get every cookie to be about the same size, so that it is easy to match them up in pairs for the sandwiches. Otherwise, you can make them any size you like.

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