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Learn how to make your own Thin Mints. Minty, chocolaty … crispy and crunchy, with a lingering deliciousness. They tingle with just the right amount of sweetness and cool freshness. As with the real thing, you’ll want to pop them in your mouth like potato chips, at room temperature or straight out of the freezer.

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Homemade Thin Mints, the Best-Selling Girl Scout Cookie, without the Middle Man

Or the Middle Girl … or the Middle Girl’s Mother

Although there are some recipes that produce Thin Mints completely from scratch, we rejected them as inappropriate. That approach seems too sophisticated, which is incongruent with the essence of Thin Mints. Thin Mints are for folks who wear blue jeans, not hand-tailored suits. Furthermore, Thin Mints contain thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, and folic acid. Do you want a Thin Mint with no partially hydrogenated palm kernel and/or cottonseed oil? We didn’t think so. There’s just no way to reproduce that chemical cocktail from scratch, unless you’re a scientist or a bio-terrorist. But you can rely on a cake mix or a Ritz cracker to do the job for you.

We at miLam are the kind of folks who wear blue jeans. However, one of us – the one who wears exclusive Lucky Brand and Motor City Denim – decided to dip our homemade Thin Mints in expensive, tempered chocolate. The rest of the staff overpowered him and switched to chocolate coating compound.

What you Need to Make 52+ Cookies

1 dark chocolate cake mix (fudge, devil’s food, etc.) ^[1]
3 Tbs shortening, melted^[2]
½ cup cake flour^[3]
1 egg
3 Tbs water

How to Make the Cookies

1. Combine everything until a dough forms.
2. Wrap the dough and refrigerate it for an hour.
3. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
4. Place half the dough on a lightly floured Silpat. Leave the rest in the fridge. Roll the dough^[4] on the Silpat to a ⅛-inch thickness. Use a 2-inch cutter to make about 26 cookies, re-rolling scraps as necessary. Cram the cookies onto nonstick sheets, quite close but not touching. Place the sheets into the fridge for a minimum of 10 minutes.
5. Bake a for 13-15 minutes. Rest the sheet on a rack. Once the cookies are cool enough to touch (which takes only a few minutes) relocate them to a rack to finish cooling.
6. Continue this process with the remaining dough, for a grand total of more than 52 cookies.

Notes:

• We recommend a stand mixer, set to its lowest speed and fitted with the paddle attachment, for this job. An ordinary hand-held will probably not be able to handle the thickness. You can do it by hand, but if that hard labor doesn’t send you running off to Macy’s to invest in a good stand mixer, we don’t know what will.
• Have patience while mixing. After for what seems like ever, the ingredients will go from looking like dust, to looking like crumbs, to collecting into single mass of dough.
• As the dough’s chilling and you’re cleaning up, you’ll note that there will be remnants of dough inside your mixing bowl. Dig your fingertips and knuckles into it, then go stand in the bathroom, and when someone’s coming by, walk out of the bathroom, pretend to be surprised as you notice your hand, and say, “Eww!” But then go, “Whatever,” and just keep walking away. It will be so much fun.
• Can you believe we’re recommending two chills? One for the dough and another for the formed cookies? This will promote non-spreadiality. (That’s the technical term.)
• Don’t roll the dough out thinner than instructed. Thicker, OK maybe. But not thinner. A ¼-inch thickness will not produce a “thin” mint, but it will be reasonably in the ballpark … in the outfield somewhere … but still, you’ll be playing major-league, and you should be proud of that.
• A used tomato paste can with both the top and bottom removed (which is the only legitimate way to remove tomato paste from a can) makes a perfect 2-inch cookie cutter. But for God’s sake, run it through the dishwasher beforehand.
• The dough should be quite easy to work with; if it’s not, something has gone terribly wrong.

What You Need to Coat the Cookies

3½ cups^[5] chopped, chocolate coating compound (approx. 20 oz.)
1½-2 tsp peppermint extract^{[7, 8]}

How to Coat the Cookies

1. Melt the chocolate. Stir in the extract until fully blended.
2. Use a fork to dip a cookie in the chocolate. Pull it out, tilt the fork, supporting the cookie with a second fork, and let the excess chocolate drip off. Lay the cookie on a Silpat to dry. Repeat with remaining cookies.

Notes:

• Banging the bottom of the folk on the side of the bowl will help you shake off a bit of chocolate, instead of waiting for it all to drip off.
• Scrape the bottom of the fork on the side of the bowl as you remove the cookie to a Silpat, twirling the fork away from the cookie as you lay it down.
• Every so often, you’ll need to reheat the chocolate to keep it at the right consistency.

What We Learned Along the Way about Chocolate

Working with “real” chocolate isn’t easy. Like most of the small children you meet on overcrowded flights, chocolate seems to lose its temper for no good reason. Chocolate that is not tempered will look good while it’s still melted, but as it sets, it will develop streaks and/or spots that will worsen over the course of a day or two. It will still taste delicious, which is a nice consolation prize, but it will also have lost a considerable amount of its creaminess – it may, in fact, turn chalky and crumbly … you probably wouldn’t want to serve it to anyone. You’ll just want to lock yourself in the pantry and eat it yourself as you cry into the dark – which is quite therapeutic, even it if does have side effects such as messiness and weight gain. (Fun fact: I crumble untempered chocolate and steam it with the milk for my morning capp.)

Tempering chocolate is usually done in a double boiler. Somehow, the very mention of a double boiler makes us want to throw in the towel. But it really is the best way. No, that’s not true. A chocolate tempering machine is the best way, if you have $1600 you don’t mind parting with.

In the course of researching this topic, we uncovered comments suggesting that making your own Thin Mints takes resources away from the Girl Scouts. Please know that buying cookies isn’t the only way to promote the scouts. There’s no reason you can’t do both.

While researching recipes, we noticed a large number of sources suggesting that chocolate chips with some shortening make a good coating. We feel that people who promote such things would be better off selling “authentic” designer handbags on eBay, or should go into politics. You should know that chocolate chips have added ingredients that help them resist melting (and therefore hold their shape better in a cookie). Think about it: you’re going to melt something that was created to be resistant to melting. It’s like you’re saying, “Please God, let take this tempering business, which is already hard, and make it even harder.” Nonetheless, we see picture after picture of beautiful results. We suspect that these pictures are taken within the first half-hour. Within 24 hours, the majority of them will have developed bloom – horrifying bloom – and that’s if you use expensive chips. Normal, everyday chips will produce results so freakish that you’ll curse yourself for having wasted your time. Bloggers of the world, stop misleading us!

Candyquik is a “chocolate flavored” product that requires no tempering and could almost care less if you took a blowtorch to it. Some people poo-poo it, saying it’s not “real chocolate.” Legally, that’s true. But like all things people say “legally,” it’s misleadingly true. Read about it here. Fact is, real Thin Mints are coated with a chocolate coating compound similar to Candiquik. Read the ingredient label. “Real” chocolate is not made with cocoa.

Undisclosed Bonus Recipe! Make your own Thin Mints by Puttin’ On the Ritz

Ingredients

A box of Ritz crackers
Similar chocolate-coating ingredients as described above

Directions

Simply coat the crackers in chocolate. That’s all.

Note that each cracker has an obvious top and bottom side. It works best to have the bottom side of the cracker become the top side of the cookie.

The result is beautiful, and – bonus – requires no baking whatsoever. They taste great, but they don’t have the right density. You might easily mistake them for Thin Mints visually, but not once you’ve popped one into your mouth. Don’t underestimate the fact that they taste great, though. They do. They’re delightful. But they’re not Thin Mints. They’re Thin Mints’ obviously-related sister, who is very pretty but kind of shallow. On the other hand, carefully mound some peanut butter onto a Ritz before chocolatizing it, and you’d have a kick-ass Peanut Butter Patty (Tagalongs) or a Chocolate-Covered Peanut Butter Ritz Sandwich. Yeah!

Notes:

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Credits for all images on this page: hover over image and/or green caption text. Click to jump to source.

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