The Great Heintz Baking Show

My dad requested that we do some baking together after supper one weekend. He needed to provide treats for bible study the next day. "Lemon bars and something with coconut" were his requests. I have a delicious lemon bar recipe, so that was a no brainer. A quick scan of my Pinterest dessert board came up with copycat girl scout samoas. 

Originally, the lemon bar recipe made an 8x8 pan. When I wrote it in my cookbook, I doubled the recipe and made it in a 9x13 pan. 

It had been a while since I made lemon bars, so when Dad and I were making them, the 8x8 pan size was stuck in my head and that's what we used. I should have known something was wrong when we had extra crust. But I chalked that up to Mom's 8x8 being small (I measured it). 

Then we poured the liquid in... It came all the way to the top of the pan. And that's when I realized my mistake. We had just put the pan into the oven and I was checking the recipe to see how long it needed to bake when I noticed the 9x13 size. I thought about pulling it out of the oven and trying to separate it, but in the end we went with doing an experiment.

Being that the liquid was so deep, it took a lot longer to bake than the recipe said. Also, the top part ended up cooking cooking and there was a layer of harder egg stuff on the top. I hoped that hanging out in the fridge overnight would cause it to go gooey like typical lemon bars. 

In the morning, the thicker layer was still there. I used a knife to peel it off and the lemon bars were salvageable underneath. Mom enjoyed eating the top part, so that didn't go to waste. 😅 The bars were a little messy and sticky, but tasted fine. 

Our second recipe was for copycat samoas. Holy cow, very putzy! Toast the coconut, chill the cookie base, bake the cookies, cool completely, melt caramel, mix the coconut in, spread on cookies individually, dip bases of cookies in melted chocolate and drizzle more on top. We made modifications to make it less work....

First, no cutting a second hole in the middle. That made them more like disks and less samoa shaped, but easier. 

After cutting out two pans worth, we opted to put the rest of the dough in a pan to make bars. That saved us a lot of time. 

We weren't going to dip the bases in chocolate, but we had so much I dipped one tray. Except the chocolate was so thick I had to spread it. 

So we had some cookies with chocolate just on top, some with it on top and bottom, and bars. As you can see, we're not going to win any awards for neatness and appearance. 😂

In the end, they tasted pretty good and they were all gone post-potluck. And even though as we made them Dad and I said we wouldn't make them again, as we sampled we discussed what we'd do differently next time: Definitely could make the cookies just on their own. Better with chocolate on the bottom and top. More coconut. Different caramel (maybe homemade?). The bar idea was good.

So there you go! If you've ever thought about making your own girl scout samoas, does our story make you excited to try or convince you to skip it? 😉