Minty and Somewhat Thin

If you haven’t noticed, the Girl Scouts have stepped up their game. Whereas when I was a kid, you needed to find a young girl with a green sash (usually at your front door) to get your annual fix of the signature cookies, and our only advertising help was word of mouth and a folded piece of printed cardboard, now you can hardly drive across town without seeing the full-size billboards. And of course Girl Scout Cookies now have their own website, facebook page, and yes, an app.

The thing is, however you get them, wherever you get them, however great may be the things you support for young girls by getting them, the fact remains that I and my family can’t eat them, any of them. And so, we do not buy them. Mostly, I don’t lose too much sleep over this, as there are any number of organizations for youth that I support, and I know that all those billboards mean that the Girl Scouts are probably still selling a few cookies without me.

But I have found that this GF journey hits me in the funniest places, and the one I smacked into this week was that my children do not know what a Thin Mint cookie tastes like! Not OK!! Indignant, I am! And so. That’s my cue: Into the kitchen! There must be GF Thin Mint-ish cookies to right this wrong! And now, I give you… GF Thin Mint-ish Cookies!

Wait, before you click over to the recipe, let me just note that there was one slight existential crisis during the development process: does the mint come from the chocolate or from the cookie itself? I couldn’t recall! And a cursory review of chocolate mint cookie recipes was no help, as some put the mint inside, some on the outside. I opted for the chocolate outside to carry the mint this time around, and it’s delicious. But I’m sure that’s not the only choice. Feel free to move it over into the dough if that’s your inclination. I believe that either way, you’ll be taking a little nostalgic Girl Scout outing—or perhaps, like my kids, creating a whole new annual fixation.