Absolutely, Positively the Bestest Way to Eat Thin Mints Ever!

The Girl Scouts are selling their cookies again, and while I’ve more or less reached the point where I no longer want to eat dessert before dinner, I can’t resist those cute youngsters and their delicious, delicious cookies. My favorites are the Thin Mints; always have been. They’ve got my two favorite confectionary flavors, chocolate and mint. They’re elegantly simple. They’re good with milk, with ice cream, or on their own. They’re good chilled or at room temperature. But there’s only one thing wrong with them: you can’t dunk ‘em.

Well, yes, you can dunk ‘em. But it doesn’t do any good. You just get a bit of milk onto the chocolate coating, which is milk-resistant. Any kid will tell you that the point of dunking a cookie is not to merely get the cookie damp, but to get the cookie to just the right degree of soggy. You want it enough to lose its crunch, but not quite enough to fall away into the glass of milk. If it does that, it’ll sink to the bottom and turn into an unappetizing slurry. Unappetizing, that is, unless you’re my buddy Scott from second grade, who used to do that to his cookies on purpose. Anyway. When you dunk a Thin Mint, it doesn’t get soggy. It just gets vaguely damp. My nine-year-old self saw this as a significant design flaw.

The chocolate coating was the problem. It was the barrier that kept the milk from working its magic on the cookie inside. Clearly, all I needed to do was to make a hole in it, and the milk could get in. No problem! But when I tested the hypothesis, it didn’t work. What was the problem? A big bite out of the cookie worked, but wasn’t optimal; the point was to get the whole cookie to that magic level of sog. Eating half the cookie before it even saw milk was kinda defeating the purpose. I wanted to get as much of the cookie dunked as possible. But a tiny bite didn’t even get the cookie very damp when I dunked it. I tried scraping some of the chocolate off the cookie. This yielded indifferent results, with more mess than it was worth. Breaking the cookie in half was chancy. When it worked, you could dunk the two halves, but when it didn’t, you got crumbs that you had to eat dry, or else turn into Slurry a-la-Scott. Hardly optimal. Then one time, just trying once more for the heck of it, I noticed some small bubbles coming up from the wee hole I’d bitten on the edge of the cookie. That was new. Closer inspection of the cookie showed a flaw in the chocolate coating. Had the other cookies had such flaws? Too late to tell.

I checked the next cookie for flaws first (there were none), and then bit a wee hole in the edge, just like before. No bubbles. Hmmmm. I’d made a hole in the coating so the milk could get in…but I hadn’t made another hole so the air could get out! Of course!

So I bit not one but two wee holes on the edge of the cookie, and dunked it. But the inside was inconsistently soggy. At best, only the half of the cookie that was submerged was damp at all, while the part of the cookie above the milk-line was still quite crunchy. Clearly, the whole thing would have to be submerged for the whole thing to be damp. Trying this, I discovered that you got the best results by holding the cookie under until the bubbles stopped. The cookie was soggy on the inside and very delicious. But this method got your fingers wet. The parents would not approve of me actually putting my fingers into my milk when dunking. Plus, it took a while for the bubbles to stop. You don’t want to be sitting there forever, with your fingers in the milk, waiting for the cookie to get soggy enough. What to do?

If you’re still with me, thank you for sticking around. Your reward is my method for eating Thin Mints, which, after you try it, I’m sure you’ll agree is the absolute bestest way to eat Thin Mints ever. Here’s what you do:

With this method, you get the added bonus of minty milk, which is also how you know you’ve slurped enough to get the cookie good and soggy. The chocolate coating, once an obstacle to getting your cookie soggy, is now a safeguard against cookie disintegration. And when you take the cookie out of the glass and put it in your mouth, you get the taste sensation of milky, minty, chocolaty childhood. What’s not to like?