Cook? When There Are Girl Scout Cookies?

I really do know how to cook. I swear. I make killer lasagna, and roasted sweet potatoes with bell pepper and goat-cheese topping, and some of the most adorable little spice cupcakes with homemade peanut butter cream cheese frosting you ever did see. But it is March.

And March means Girl Scout Cookies.

And there is no refuting this fundamental truth of American life, which is: $4 per box is an outrageous crime of a price for a box of 12 cookies, and I would like five, please. Have fun at camp, ladies. 

A local Girl Scout Brownie troop was selling their cookies to spend half on summer camp scholarships for girls in the troop with lower income families, and sending the other half of their proceeds to Haiti to help buy school supplies for grade school girls there. Um, awesome. High fives for all Girl Scouts all the time.

So I bought one of each box, because while I knew that Thin Mints are The Awesome, I had never even heard of Thank U Berry Munches, and I had a coworker who was whining about never being able to find Lemon Chalet Cremes. So. I found something out: there are two separate Girl Scout Cookie Bakeries. Depending on which bakery your local Troop orders from, the cookies may have different names, and some of the bakeries do not make all of the same cookies overlapping. Which is why you can only get Lemon Chalet Cremes from the people who call the chocolate-covered peanut butter and cookie cookies “Tagalongs,” instead of “Peanut Butter Patties.”

For real.

So anyway, The Assessment:

Tagalongs, otherwise known as Peanut Butter Patties, are delicious. Like, this was the first box to disappear. Of course, part of the reason for that is that there are only 15 cookies per box. They come in a cellophane tray and they are disgustingly rich, which is why I made myself sick on them first. Mister Bruiseday says these are the cookies you go for when you need to eat your feelings. He said that around a mouthful of them, so I now have to wonder if I should be worried. Maybe I’ll eat another box while I fret about it.

Lemon Chalet Cremes, which don’t have an alternate name because they’re only available from Little Brownie Bakers, claim to have “a touch of cinnamon ginger spice,” but until I nibbled exclusively on the cookie without eating the lemon frosting in the middle, I couldn’t taste it. The cookie alone tastes like a Cinnamon Teddy Graham, but with the lemon cream they’re actually a pretty unique cookie. They are called Lemon Chalet Cremes because there is a picture of a house on one side of the cookie. Honestly, I think they smell like dish soap, but they taste pretty good.

Samoas, otherwise known as Caramel deLites, which, by the way, I find an extremely misleading name because there is nothing lite about a cookie made out of chocolate, cookie, caramel, and coconut, are Mister Bruiseday’s favorite Girl Scout cookie. He pictures himself on a beach eating these cookies. I picture myself hiding under a giant tee shirt on the beach because I put so many of these into my belly. I think they might be called Samoas because of certain racist stereotypes about Samoan body types – but that’s neither here nor there. Where it is is in my belly.

Do-Si-Dos, AKA Peanut Butter Cremes, are Nutter Butters, but round instead of Circus Peanut shaped. And that is all they are. And they are also going in my belly. (That name, by the way? Do-Si-Dos? Girl, you know you aren’t do-si-doin’ anytime soon after eating these things.) Mister Bruiseday was convinced they smelled like beef until I reminded him he had just fed the dog some treats before eating these cookies.

Trefoils (named after the Girl Scout insignia, which is how they are shaped, by the way), also known as Shortbread, are exactly what they sound like: trefoil-shaped-shortbread cookies. They’re nothing special, but they’re excellent with tea, or any other hot beverage for that matter. I think they’re sort of the Girl Scout Nostalgia cookie: uber branded, tastes like nothing but a stick of butter, meant to be eaten in a borrowed Sunday School classroom.

Thank U Berry Munches – yep, you read that right – are the cookie I don’t want to talk about. The website swears there are white fudge chips in these cookies, but all I tasted were the dried-out flakes of cranberry and the type of rock-hard, dried-out cookie that scrapes your gums and makes you feel thirsty. Definitely my least favorite of the bunch, by a mile.

But finally, Thin Mints. The golden standard of Girl Scout Cookies. The Girl Scout Cookies website informs me that these routinely outsell any other cookie the Scouts come up with, and it’s no surprise. They’re covered in dark chocolate with a chocolate cookie drenched in light, vanilla-ish mint. I was nice and gave Mister B the rest of the three or so Samoas that were left when I was sure I really “got” them, but I’ve been stingy with the Thin Mints because they’re mine, all mine. A frozen yogurt shop near my office totally got the hint about these cookies and crushed them up as one of the available yogurt toppings, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve replaced more than one work-day lunch with chocolate fro-yo covered in crushed Thin Mints.

Sure, these cookies are pumped full of preservatives, inflated in price, and nearly impossible to get your hands on. But they’re delicious (if you pretend Thank U Berry Munch is a tacky joke instead of a devastatingly bad excuse for hard tack in expensive cookie form) and they’re for a good cause. So, visit girlscoutcookies.org and use their search feature to locate a troop selling near you! Your belly will thank you. It will thank you berry, berry munch.