Homemade Girl Scout Cookies: Thin Mints

Homemade Thin Mint Cookies
Adapted from In Katrina’s Kitchen
Printable Recipe

1 1/4 cups butter, at room temperature
2 cups powdered sugar
1 cup dutch processes cocoa or dark cocoa powder (I used Hershey’s Special Dark Cocoa)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups flour

1 pound good quality melting chocolate – I used half milk and half semi-sweet chocolate, all dark chocolate would be great too!
Pure Peppermint extract

In a stand mixer, with a cookie paddle attached, cream the butter and sugar together on medium speed until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the cocoa powder, salt, and vanilla and mix until incorporated. Add half of the flour and mix. Add the remaining flour, 1/4 cup at a time until you get a pretty dry dough. You don’t want the dough to be sticky at all and it might even crumble just a little. Don’t be worried about a dry dough…we want a cookie that doesn’t spread when baked and is crispy!  Divide the dough into 3 balls and pat them together to form a disk. Cover the disks in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 15 minutes.

Now if your world is crazy like mine and 3 hours instead of 15 minutes pass before you get back to baking, let the dough rest at room temperature for 15 minutes. The butter makes the dough super stiff if it’s too cold.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Remove plastic from one disk and roll your dough out between two pieces of parchment paper or on a lightly floured surface. Roll the dough thin! We are talking 1/4 inch to an 1/8 inch thick. Use a 2 inch circle cutter to cut out the cookies. Place on a cookie sheet and bake for 8-9 minutes. It’s super hard to tell when a near black cookie is done. I baked mine for 10 minutes the first round and they tasted burnt on the bottom, so you’ll need to adjust as you go. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Place the cookies on a wire rack to cool.

After cookies have cooled completely, it’s time to get dippin’!

Chop up your chocolate. Put it in a microwave safe bowl and microwave it for 1 minute. Reduce your power to half and continue to microwave in 30 second increments, stirring after each 30 seconds. Do this until your chocolate is smooth and melted. It’s possible to scorch and ruin your chocolate in the microwave. If you are prone do to this, use a double boiler method instead. If your chocolate seems too thick, you can add a little shortening to thin it out. When your chocolate is melted, stir in your peppermint extract. I started with 1/2 teaspoon of peppermint extract and then added it a few drops at a time until it was minty enough for me. You should be right around 1 teaspoon of extract.

Drop a cookie in the melted chocolate and make sure all of it gets covered in the chocolate. Fish the cookie out with a fork. Tap the fork on the edge of your bowl to encourage extra chocolate to drip off. Place the chocolate-coated cookie on a piece of parchment or waxed paper until set. If you don’t want to wait for the chocolate to cool you can place them in the fridge or freezer to speed things up.

I tasted one the night that I made them and was surprised how normal-tasting they were. I wasn’t in love. The next morning however, magic had happened. The cookie had absorbed some of the moisture from the chocolate and the mint flavor had time to merry with the chocolate. The texture of the cookie in the center was then exactly what I was looking for! So if you can, make these a day in advance and let them sit. I hear they store well in the fridge and freezer just like real Thin Mints, but mine didn’t last that long.