Bites from other Blogs

It is Girl Scout cookie season and that means that it is time to stock up on your favorite flavors, unless you are already making your own Homemade Girl Scout Cookies to enjoy year-round. Girl Scout cookies can be eaten straight out of the box, but they’re also a great ingredient and can be transformed into all kinds of other recipes.

• Thin Mints are the most popular Girl Scout cookies and there are plenty of delicious things you can make with a box of them if you don’t simply want to hoard your extras in the freezer for a few months. The Thin Mint Brookies from Beyond Frosting are one tasty place to start. The recipe starts with a fudgy brownie layer that is packed with crumbled Thin Mint cookies. The brownie layer is spread onto the bottom of a pan and topped with a layer of mint chocolate chip-studded cookie dough. The result is rich and chewy, with plenty of mint chocolate flavor for Thin Mint fans to enjoy.
• Tagalongs are the Girl Scout cookies that are similar to a peanut butter cup, with peanut butter layered on top of a shortbread cookie and enrobed in chocolate. Lemons for Lulu was inspired by them to make Tagalong Whoopie Pies. These soft, cake-like cookie sandwiches don’t use any real Girl Scout cookies in the recipe, but they do capture their flavors. They’re made with both vanilla and chocolate whoopie pie halves – one for the flavor of the cookie and one for the flavor of the chocolate coating – and they’re sandwiched together with a peanut butter filling. A drizzle of chocolate to finish your batch will make them taste even more like the original Tagalongs.
• Magic cookie bars are one of my favorite bar cookies because they’re so easy to make. Something Swanky‘s Thin Mint Magic Cookie Bars have just six ingredients – which you probably already have in your pantry, if you have stocked up on Girl Scout Cookies already – and can be whipped up in just a few minutes. The bars are moist, chewy and loaded with an entire package chocolate mint Thin Mints. The bars are quite sweet and rich, but fortunately it is easy even for Thin Mint lovers to be satisfied with a bite or two, so they can be cut into small pieces and shared with friends and family.
• Dessert Now Dinner Later turned a box of Thin Mints into Chocolate Thin Mint Ice Cream, for a frozen version of the popular cookie. The rich chocolate ice cream is a custard based ice cream, so it has a velvety texture and a rich mouthfeel. It is flavored with cocoa powder, melted chocolate and with crushed Thin Mint Cookies, so it really captures the flavor of the cookie as well as the flavor of chocolate. More Thin Mints are stirred into the ice cream after it has been churned, as well, so you get nice crispy pieces of Thin Mint in each bite of ice cream as you enjoy it.
• Samoas are almost as popular as Thin Mints and they provide great flavors to work with if you want to create a Samoas-inspired recipe. Beantown Baker‘s Samoas Rice Krispy Treats combine chocolate, coconut and caramel with a crispy, chewy rice krispy treat base that is easy to make and good enough to give regular chocolate bars a run for their money. You need to start with a batch of homemade rice krispy treats, then cover them with a layer of creamy caramel, with salt, pecans and coconut added for flavor and texture. Once the bars have set, they can be sliced and dipped in chocolate to add that signature bottom coating that you’ll also find on the Samoas that inspired these.