Samoa Cookies

52 Weeks of Cookies:  Week 42

I found this recipe on Just a Taste

Warning, these cookies will take a while to make.  Make them on a day you don't have much going on!

The alterations I made?  Not many... obviously I did not choose to go with the doughnut look for these cookies... I just figured using circles WITHOUT the middle cut out would be faster and easier... also, I don't have any circular cookie cutters so there's that (I just use a small cup to cut out the circles).

I didn't have any dark chocolate so I used semi sweet instead.

One word of warning that the recipe actually states as well.  Coconut will burn pretty quickly... we might all know this but also remember that the parchment paper that you put the coconut on will also burn if it touches the element in your oven.  Yes, I had a small kitchen fire while making these.  No the smoke detector didn't go off... it was pretty small and I got it put out right away.  What happened?  I was making toasting my coconut in the toaster oven instead of the oven so the pan is significantly smaller and I didn't bother to cut the parchment paper to fit it properly.  The first few minutes it was all fine.  I took the pan out of the toaster oven and mixed the coconut and then put the pan in the other way... which is when the parchment paper caught fire.  I quickly put just that area under the tap and leaned the pan that way so that the water wouldn't get all over the pan... and hardly any coconut was lost in the process.  After this happened I decided my coconut was toasted enough though.

A few notes... 

The bit of caramel you spread on your cookies before putting the caramel and coconut mixture on is important.  It holds the coconut onto the cookie.  I ran out of caramel for one cookie so left it off... and the coconut kept sliding off of the cookie.  So don't think you can get away with skipping that step!

The caramel coconut mixture will thicken up but won't harden up so that you can't manipulate it.  I found that spooning a bit on the cookies and leaving it for a few minutes and then going back and smoothing it out on the cookies worked much better than trying to smooth it around while it was still warm... it just stuck to everything then!

When I put the chocolate on the bottom of the cookies I placed them upside down on the tray (caramel coconut side down) and then put them in the fridge for a bit.  This hardened up the chocolate so that it wouldn't all come off on the pan.

The finished product!

By this point I was nearly out of chocolate and it was getting kind of late so I didn't care about what the tops looked like (but I'm not sure I would have cared much had it not been late either)

Samoa Cookies

I give these cookies a 9/10.  They are scrumptious but they take a loooong time to make.

Last week I made some Chocolate Chip Pretzel Cookies that were quite good