by Dennis Dalman
editor@thenewsleaders.com
Who wants a digital cookie?
The answer is lots of people, once they find out the cookies are those annual tasty treats called Girl Scout Cookies.
Girl Scouts were recently trained in computer skills to help with their digital cookie sales in the greater St. Cloud area.
Here is how Digital Cookies will work: A Girl Scout will be able to market their online cookie business by inviting customers to visit their personalized cookie websites through a link sent to them via email. Girls can also take in-person orders using a mobile application designed specifically for the Girls Scouts.
Customers can pay with a credit card and have their cookies shipped in the mail or delivered by a Scout.
Not all Girl Scout councils nationwide will go digital quite yet, but the ones in the greater St. Cloud area are. Some girls may still choose to go door-to-door or work at booths so they can take orders and then place orders on smart phones.
With Digital Cookies, 100 percent of sale proceeds will remain with the Girl Scout council that sponsors the sales. The money, each year, is used to fund community-service projects, camp getaways for girls and other needs of the council.
Girl Scout cookies are baked by two commercial bakers: ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers. Those bakers offer eight varieties of Girl Scout cookies. Only three of those types are made mandatory by the organization (Thin Mints, Peanut-Butter Sandwich/Do-Si-Dos and Shortbread/Trefoils).
Thin Mints are the most popular cookie (25 percent of purchases), followed by Samoas/Caramel deLites (19 percent) and Peanut-Butter Patties/Tagalongs (13 percent).
Girl Scout cookie sales began nearly 100 years ago, in 1917 when mothers and daughters began baking and selling cookies to help fund Scouting activities and special projects. The Scouts was founded in 1912 by Julia Gordon Low.
The first known organized cookie sales were by the Mistletoe Troop in Muskogee, Okla. when home-baked cookies were sold in a high-school cafeteria as part of a service project. Most of the earlier home-baked cookies were simple sugar cookies packaged in wax-paper bags and sold for 25- to 30-cents per dozen.
The following is a recipe from 1922 that was widely used to make the first home-baked Girl Scout cookies.
Girl Scout Cookies
(makes about 6 dozen cookies)
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
Additional sugar for topping
2 eggs
2 Tbsp. milk
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. baking powder
Cream butter and the cup of sugar. Add well-beaten eggs, then milk, vanilla, flour, salt and baking powder. Refrigerate at least one hour. Roll dough, cut into shapes and sprinkle sugar on top if desired.
Bake in a preheated 375-degree oven for 8-10 minutes or until the edges begin to brown slightly.
In recent years, the boxes containing Girl Scout cookies have become eye-fetching colorful, as in this photo.
This post card, from the 1930s, advertised “Girl Scout Cookie Day.”
In the mid-1940s, during WW II, there was a shortage of butter and flour and so the Girl Scouts back then took to selling calendars instead of the cookies they formerly sold.