Homemade Tagalongs

We don’t have a lot of Girl Scouts around here, so I rarely get to sample Girl Scouts cookies. They’re too expensive anyway. But one time our pastor passed us a box of Tagalongs — cookie, peanut butter, chocolate — that were delicious.

So it occurred to me the other day — could these be made at home? A quick internet search revealed a website called Back for Seconds that promised Tagalongs could be made with three ingredients. I decided to give it a try.

I actually ended up using five ingredients: peanut butter, vanilla wafers, chocolate chips, shortening, and corn syrup.

I started with a cup of peanut butter and a quarter-cup of corn syrup…

…which I mixed together to make the peanut butter a bit sweeter.

Then I took a cup of chocolate chips (semi-sweet) and added a heaping tablespoon of shortening (for extra smoothness), which I melted in the microwave.

When melting chocolate chips in the microwave, be careful not to heat it for more than about thirty seconds at a time. After each thirty seconds, give it a good stir, then if necessary pop it in for another thirty seconds. Depending on the strength of your microwave, it probably won’t take more than one minute, maybe 90 seconds tops, to have liquified chocolate.

As the chocolate cools and becomes less runny, you may have to re-zap it for another few seconds to keep the chocolate liquidy enough.

At first, I added a dab of peanut butter to each cookie, then dunked the cookie into the chocolate. Doing them one at a time in this way turned out to be too messy.

What I ended up doing was making the cookies assembly-line fashion, where I dabbed a bunch of cookies with peanut butter first, then started dunking in chocolate. Another little trick I learned: when peanut butter is cool, it won’t “adhere” to the cookies very well. So I popped the peanut butter in the microwave for about thirty seconds, which warmed it just enough to smear beautifully on the cookies.

Because the peanut butter cooled fairly fast, I worked in batches of about twenty cookies. First I smeared them with peanut butter, then I started dunking them in chocolate.

Using a fork to fish out the cookie allows the extra chocolate to drip off.

Gradually I worked my way through the whole box of vanilla wafers, stopping to re-zap either the chocolate or the peanut butter as necessary.

Then I put them in the freezer for a few hours to cool and harden.

The results were so good that I ended up taking them to our neighborhood potluck, since it was my turn to bring dessert. The cookies should stay refrigerated since the chocolate becomes gooey at room temperature.

What a nice easy (and inexpensive) way to make a delicious cookie!

By the way, this Back for Seconds website has an impressive array of duplicate recipes for popular items. Definitely worth checking out!

Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2014/03/homemade-tagalongs.html