Recently I've been a little obsessed with the show Unique Sweets. They essentially travel around the US and find the best sweets that fit a particular subject. The best part is that the shops and sweets that are featured really are quite unique and amazing. While watching the show one day I found myself inspired by a donut shop in San Francisco. The donuts sold at Dynamo don't seem like your normal run of the mill donuts, they sell bizarre flavors like Chocolate Rose Geranium Hazelnut and Bacon Maple Apple. There was one donut in particular though that made me want to run to the kitchen, or run to the shop in SF: the apricot cardamom. I am aware that not everyone is a huge cardamom fan but I love the stuff and loved the thought of making a spicy cookie with a sweet jam glaze. Hence was born my Cardamom Ginger Cookie with Sugar Brandy Apricot Glaze.

It's the time of year when girl scouts or parents of girl scouts are out with their cookie order forms pushing their delicious, addictive treats. I love but hate that they only come around once a year. Knowing that the cookies wouldn't be around for long I started wondering how hard would it be to make my own. Could I recreate one of my favorite girl scout cookies? So began my baking adventure of trying to recreate the Tagalong.

Of course as soon as I had the idea of making my own Tagalongs I turned to the internet to do some research. I landed on a site that I frequent for it's great food pictures and even though I'd never tried one of their recipes I decided to give it a go. The results were a little sad. I followed the recipe to the end without questioning it and found it lacking in the following ways. There was less peanut butter filling than was necessary, the shortbread cookie recipe used wasn't quite sturdy enough and so when dipped in chocolate it became a little chewy instead of having that nice bite and the instructions for the chocolate coating should have called for more liquid to thin it down more as it was hard to get a light coating of chocolate. Finally, it called for dark chocolate which I thought might be a nice spin on the childhood favorite and would make the cookie a little more adult but I found that it just overwhelmed all the other ingredients. Everything combined the result left you only tasting dark chocolate. Which is delicious but not a Tagalong.