Samoas (or Caramel Delights)

There has been a lot of controversy this year regarding Girl Scout Cookies. My understanding is that the Girl Scouts are giving very little money back to the troop for the sales of cookies compared with times past, which makes it difficult for the girls to get to camp.

I say all of this not to get involved in an argument over which I know little, but just to say that the purpose of making your own version of Girl Scout Cookies is not to steal money from young ladies who want to go to camp. Rather, it gives you some opportunities: 1) If you want to find another way to raise money, you could bake your own cookies and hold a bake sale instead of selling pre-boxed cookies. You don't need to sell cookies at a bake sale, but if you were to make these, there would be a certain harmony with the Girl Scout cookie sale idea. 2) You can only get these cookies once a year. Now you have the ability to do so more often. 3) Now you know you can.

Long-time readers (and, heck, those of you who have been reading for a few weeks now) will find these cookies very familiar, as they are very similar to the homemade Twix-like cookies that I recently wrote about. Most of the same ingredients, small variation with a fancy new technique. This is not a coincidence. I think I'll be done with the chocolate-caramel-cookies for the rest of the year, but I wanted to show how just knowing a few basic techniques and having a few staples in your kitchen can give you a lot of options.

For ingredients, you'll need everything from the Twix-like cookies (which consists of shortbread cookies and caramel with some chocolate (milk chocolate this time)), and you'll also need shredded coconut. You have options here, but I went with the regular sweetened stuff. You could do frozen, or you could do fresh, or you could use the stuff from King Arthur Flour.

Make some shortbread cookies. Instead of rectangles or small circles, you want to make a roll 3, 3-1/2" in diameter. Spend some time making it nice, and be sure it gets plenty of time to chill. You will need the dough firm for what's to come.

Today's technique calls for a special piece of equipment. There are other ways to get this done, but I had one of these in the drawer, so that's what I went with: the apple corer. Some may call this a unitasker, but some would be wrong, as we will see. Cut your dough cylinder so that the corer will be able to go through each section.

Next, core the dough, being careful to go through the middle and straight down. If you angle it too much, not only are the holes not going to be in the center, but you will break through your dough and have to re-roll it. This happened to me. It's not catastrophic, but it is a pain, as you'll have to re-chill the dough before you can try again.

Now, you have some dough that looks like this:

And you'll have some extra dough:

Now, if you break your second roll like I did, you can incorporate the spare dough from the first roll into the second one, giving you some more cookies. Or you could could little cookie dots, make a shortbread snake, or just flatten it out into another cookie. Have fun.

Next, slice the cookies. You're looking for 1/8"-ish. It's more important that they are consistently sliced, which is not my strength, as I tend to slice on some sort of diagonal. That's a habit that needs breaking. But if your cookies are uneven, either on a per-cookie basis or between cookies, then something that starts like:

Will end up looking like this when it's done:

Which didn't keep me from using any of these cookies, but there is another way. I mean, another way aside from slicing it right the first time. If you just can't keep from slicing poorly, after you're done cutting, squish the cookies until they are an even thickness. Thickness is more important than diameter for even baking in this case, because we have the hole in the center. Depending on your technique (mine was to use my hands), you may get something that looks more like:

Which is much better than the last batch for evenness. Don't worry so much about the look, though, as you will be disguising the cookies shortly.

Make some caramel, but only bring it to the softball stage (240°F):

and melt/temper some chocolate:

just like you did with the Twix-like cookies. In this case, I decided to use milk chocolate instead of dark. Really good milk chocolate, but milk chocolate even so.

Drizzle the caramel onto the cookies. The amount and technique is entirely up to you, but I found that I got better at the drizzling as I went along. My first batch:

and my second:

Next, add drizzle some chocolate:

And add some coconut:

And there you have it! Incidentally, I had a bunch of caramel and chocolate left over, because I used some restraint with the cookies. Melanie suggested dipping the bottom of the cookies in the chocolate, and you could certainly add more caramel if you wanted. But if you have a lot left over, you could just do like I did and make a batch of chocolate caramels. I had a silicone bake pan, I just poured the caramel in, then poured the chocolate over it.

After that cools, turn it inside out to get everything out of the pan and cut up into what ended up being about 50 caramels.

Share and enjoy. Reports from the field show that these are very popular with the people who you give them to, if you aren't going to end up selling them in a bake sale.

Comments

[Liz]

Having had the opportunity to eat (OK, very quickly shovel two of these into my mouth) I have to say that these may be the best cookies I've ever eaten. No joke. And, if you've seen me, you know that I've had more than my fair share of cookies, which makes me a very critical judge of how heavenly a cookie is.

[Jenni]

I love Samoas, but the ingredient list scares me. What a great alternative! I think that since I don't want to hammer a corer through a cylinder of dough, I'll just roll and cut it w/round cutters. ;)

[Wendi @ Bon Appetit Hon]

I've gone down the at home version of Samoas and they are divine. I opted to make mine as bar cookies...no coring or cutting needed!