Girl Scout Thin Mints (homemade)

My brother Kevin, like nearly everyone else in the country, loves Thin Mints. It's kinda my dad's fault: come Girl Scout cookie selling time, he'd only buy Thin Mints (and of course immediately put them in the freezer. Dad likes everything cold but this was the one thing that we agreed is better when cold). Kevin even asked me to make the Thin Mint Gooey Cake Bars just for him for his birthday a few years ago because he'd like them so much the first time I made them for everyone. So this year I decided to make him Thin Mints (thanks to the internet, there are a lot of homemade Girl Scout cookie recipes). I looked through my pins and finally settled on a recipe from This Grandma Is Fun.

Girl Scout Thin Mint Cookies (source)

Ingredients

Cookies

• 1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
  
• 1 cup unsweetened Dutch Process cocoa powder
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

Chocolate Coating

• 20 ounces semi-sweet baking chocolate, or dark dipping chocolate
• 2 teaspoons peppermint extract or oil

Directions

1. Set oven to 350℉
2. Cream butter until light and fluffy, then add the powdered sugar and mix until combined. Stir in the salt, vanilla and cocoa powder. Mix until the cocoa powder is integrated and the batter resembles a thick frosting. Add the flour and mix just until the flour is combined, making sure to not over mix.
3. Form dough into a ball.
4. Using about 1/3 of the dough at a time, roll it thin on a lightly floured surface, about 1/8-inch. Cut cookies using 2-inch cutter (my cutter is 2 1/4-inch so the cookies were a smidge bigger). Gather the scraps and press together lightly and cut remaining cookies. Place up to 20 cookies on a jelly roll pan, lined with parchment paper or lightly grease a cookie sheet. The cookies will not spread much while baking.
5. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove the cookies from the oven and allow them to cool completely before removing from baking sheet.
6. While the cookies bake, make the peppermint coating (because of time I did this a couple days later. I left them out for a day but then realized I should probably put them in the fridge. Didn't seem to affect them too much). Chop the baking chocolate into very small, thin pieces (or break into small pieces). Place in a glass bowl or similar container and microwave for about 30 seconds at a time, stirring with a spoon or a whisk. When the chocolate is melted, stir in the peppermint extract.
7. Gently drop the cookies, one at a time, into the coating. Turn to coat entirely, then lift the cookie out of the chocolate with the fork and tap the fork on the side of the pan until the extra coating drips off. Place on a parchment baking sheet, and repeat for the rest of the cookies. Place the cookies in the refrigerator or freezer to set for a few minutes.

Yield about 50-2 inch cookies (I ended up having not enough chocolate coating for all the cookies I made but I was able to give him somewhere between 40 and 50 cookies).

Almost everyone at the family party (which included some of Kevin's friends) had one and loved them. Except Kevin. But I did ask him when I saw him on Father's Day and he said he liked them too.