Homemade Samoas

Y'know... like the Girl Scout cookie. These are amazing. I'm not gonna lie, they were a lot of work. But they were so worth it. The coconut caramel topping is the right amount of chewy, the shortbread base has great crunch, and the chocolate just makes them that much more amazing.



Homemade Samoas

For the shortbread:
1 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 tbs milk

For the toppings:
3 cups shredded coconut, toasted
15 oz soft caramels (I used a 14 oz. bag of Kraft caramels)
1/4 tsp salt
3 to 4 tbs milk
8 oz semisweet chocolate (I used 1 cup chocolate chips)
8 oz milk chocolate (I broke up a chocolate bar)

To make the shortbread:
-Cream together butter and sugar with a mixer until light and fluffy.
-In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Slowly add to the butter mixture.
-At low speed, add in the milk and vanilla.
-Separate the dough into halves (or thirds) and wrap in plastic or store in tupperware. Refrigerate until the dough is as firm as a stick of butter. (I wrapped my dough in saran wrap and refrigerated overnight.)
-When your dough is firm enough to roll out, preheat the oven to 350. Roll dough on lightly floured surface to 1/8" thickness, and use cookie cutter or biscuit cutter to cut dough into circles.
-Place cookies on cookie sheet, and bake for 8 to 12 minutes, depending on cookie size and thickness. They should be barely golden around the edges. Cool on cooling rack.

To make the Coconut Caramel Topping:
-Place caramels, milk and salt in a microwave safe bowl and microwave until melted; about three minutes, stirring every 45 seconds.
-Stir the toasted coconut into the caramel mixture.
-Using a knife or offset spatula, spread the caramel mixture on top of your cookies. (This is when I realized I needed closer to 4 tablespoons of milk in my mixture.) You may need to reheat the mixture every 10 minutes since it gets difficult to spread as it cools.

Base coat and drizzle with chocolate:
-Place all the chocolate in microwave safe bowl and microwave until melted; about 2 minutes, stirring every 30 seconds.
-Dip the bottoms of the cookies in the chocolate. Or use a spoon or knife and spread the chocolate on. Or put a little dollop of chocolate on the bottom center of the cookie, and slowly squish and turn the cookie on waxed paper until you can see the chocolate peeking under the edges. Whatever your method, place in rows on wax paper.
-Spoon remaining chocolate into piping bag (or a ziplock baggie, and then snip off a tiny corner), and pipe chocolate in rows across the cookies.
-Let chocolate cool completely, then remove from wax paper.
-Enjoy!

Recipe adapted from Instructables.