Dear Mom,
As part of our weekly routine, the Young Lady and I bake cookies on Sunday evenings while the boys are off playing hockey. The goal is to bake enough cookies to supply lunch boxes for the week. Any extras are bonus to be eaten through the week, and ususally do not make it past Wednesday. We are not too exotic with our recipes and have some favorites, but occasionally we try out new recipes.
This past Sunday, we tried what was a fairly easy recipe that we tried making easier so we wouldn't end up with chocolate up to our knuckles. We had a few "what if we tried this" and "oh! I know what we can do" moments and ended up with a
really good, simple, no bake cookie.
We are calling them Inside Out Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies.
Here is what we did.
Dump one 12oz bag of Nestle's MILK Chocolate Chips (not semi-sweet) into a gallon-size zip lock bag. Add 2 or 3 drops of Peppermint extract. Seal the bag, squeezing out as much of the air as you can. Microwave the bag in 15 second increments, squeezing the contents after each round, until the chocolate is melted. This won't take long and you don't want to do the melting so fast that you end up melting the bag, because that would be a huge mess.
While the chocolate is melting, line the counter top with a generous piece of wax paper. Place a couple of sleeves of Ritz crackers in a single layer on the wax paper. Set aside the remaining 2 sleeves, but have them handy.
Once the chocolate is all melted, work the chocolate into one of the bottom corners of the bag and then cut a very tiny bit of this corner off, turning it into a kind of pastry bag. Squirt a blop of chocolate onto the center of each cracker and if you have a helper, have them follow behind you and place a second cracker on top of the warm chocolate. You will want to work fast enough to get all the chocolate out of the bag while it is still melty. If you are working alone, you can go back and add the top layer of crackers after you have used up all the chocolate. If the chocolate cools too fast on the crackers before you can add the second layer, stick them in the microwave for a few seconds to soften the chocolate and you are good to go.
Let the chocolate cool off and TADA! Inside Out Thin Mints.
This recipe is NOT intended to replace the real deal. When a Girl Scout comes to your door, on what is certainly going to be the coldest day of the winter, buy a box. It should be a law. I still bear the emotional scars of trying to sell cookies after Sheryl Place's mom got her out of school
early so she could canvas the entire neighborhood before we even got off the bus. I don't care how many boxes I've already purchased. If a Girl Scout comes to my door, I always buy one more box.
Love,
Kim
