Homemade Caramelly, Chocolaty, Coconutty Goodness. AKA Homemade Samoas.

Girl Scout cookies, whatever your preferences, are delicious.  They're a necessary supply in pantries throughout the US.  Unfortunately they're only available to order for a very short time.  My personal favorites are the caramelly, chocolaty, coconutty goodness that are Samoas.  Pinterest graced me with this recipe, and I'm sure you could find other homemade recipes for all your Girl Scout cravings.

I will put the ingredients for the cookie dough here, but I will add a link to the actual recipe and the how-to here, this part of the blog post-pair is going to have the recipe customized to Homemade Girl Scout Samoas.

Ingredients

Cookie Dough:

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1/2 cup sugar

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 Tablespoons milk

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Caramel Coconut Topping:

3 cups shredded sweetened coconut

15 ounces soft caramels

3 Tablespoons milk

1/4 teaspoon salt

8 ounces dark chocolate

Instructions:

Cookies:

Follow the linked recipe.  When you roll the dough out cut it using a two-inch cutter, then cut out the centers using a one-inch cutter.

Bake the cookies for ten minutes on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet, rotating them half of the way through.  Set the finished cookies on a wire rack to cool.

Coconut Topping:

Distribute the coconut evenly onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.  Bake the coconut until toasted and is a golden brown, ten minutes maximum.  Flip and stir the coconut frequently to avoid burning, typically every two minutes.

Melt the caramels in a double boiler, then add the milk and salt.  You can also microwave the caramels, its much faster and works just as well.  When you add the milk it's going to seem very runny, but add the salt and it gets a lot better.

The next part is where I forged my own way, kind of.  The original recipe said to add the caramel to the coconut then put it on top of the cookies, but I put caramel on top of the cookies first then added the leftover caramel to the coconut.

Put the caramel-covered coconut onto the cookies, this is an extremely messy part.  I couldn't find any other way to do it other than use my hands, it stuck to the spoon, a knife isn't exact enough, just endure the mess and use your fingers.  I was unable to cover all the cookies with coconut, although that was probably due to the amount of coconut I put on each cookie initially.

Allow the cookies to cool for at least a half hour, I left them overnight because it was 10:30 by the time I finished this part and I had other things to do.

Melt the chocolate in a double-boiler, or, again, the microwave.  Dip the bottoms of the cookies in the chocolate (use a knife to wipe excess chocolate off), and place the cookies onto wax paper to allow the chocolate to set.  To apply the chocolate stripes I put melted chocolate into a cake decorator and squeezed it out as I went.  This is the same technique I used on the Langues de Chat.

Allow the chocolate to harden fully then enjoy!  If you need to quicken this process then the cookies can go in the refrigerator.

Tips:

~ When melting the caramel, melt all of the caramels in one bowl at the same time, then add the milk and salt when the caramel is smooth.

~ For the chocolate, chocolate chips are perfectly fine.  I recommend dark chocolate.

~ Whenever I say wax or parchment paper, I used aluminum foil.  It turned out I didn't have any wax or parchment paper at my house, so if you don't it's not the end of the world.