Dear Constant Reader,
Earlier this year I came across The Nineteenth Amendment Centennial Cookbook: 100 Recipes for 100 Years. I was thrilled to discover it contained the recipe for the original Girl Scout cookies. I was a Girl Scout for some years and selling cookies was a huge part of it. In fact, one year every girl in my troop had to each sell 200 boxes to help finance a trip we were taking. I can’t imagine baking the cookies as well as selling them! But I had to see what they tasted like.
If you’re one of my Patrons, you can see a video of me baking and then trying these cookies.
You need…
flour, sugar, butter, baking powder, eggs, vanilla, salt, and milk.
Cream the butter and sugar together. Beat the eggs and stir in. Add the milk and vanilla, and then the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix well.
Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill for an hour.
Roll out the dough and cut into shapes. The recipe says trefoils, the Girl Scout emblem, but I don’t have a trefoil cutter and I wasn’t going to free-hand it with a knife. I used a heart-shaped cookie cutter Scratch made for me (awwwww….). The dough was really sticky and I needed a fair bit of additional flour to roll it out. After I cut the cookies, I decided to throw them in the fridge for 15 minutes to firm up before baking.
I sprinkled the cookies with a little sugar and popped them in a 375F oven until the edges browned, 8-10 minutes, then let them cool on a rack. They had spread a little bit in the baking and the heart shapes were no longer so distinct.
How did they taste? Well, like sugar cookies. Crispy around the edges and soft in the middle. Perfectly delicious sugar cookies. If I made them again (and I might), instead of rolling out the dough and using cookie cutters, I’d form the dough into small balls and flatten them with the bottom of a glass dipped in sugar.
Original Girl Scout Cookies
1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 Tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
Cream butter and sugar.
Add well-beaten egg.
Then add milk, vanilla, flour, salt, and baking powder.
Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Roll out dough, cut into trefoil shapes, and sprinkle sugar on top
Bake in a quick oven (375F) for about 8-10 minutes, until edges begin to brown.
Cool and serve!
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