Girl Scout Trefoils Cookies Recipe

Trefoils are the Girl Scout shortbread cookie. A homemade version is a butter shortbread with five ingredients: beat a cup of butter with half a cup of sugar, vanilla and salt, mix in two and a quarter cups of flour, chill the dough, roll it a quarter inch thick, cut small rounds and bake them at 325°F for about fifteen minutes.

What Trefoils are

Girl Scouts of the USA describes Trefoils as shortbread cookies inspired by the original Girl Scout Cookie recipe. Both licensed bakers, ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers, make them, and the same page notes that the two bakers' recipes and ingredients may differ slightly.

Little Brownie Bakers lists enriched flour, soybean and palm oil and sugar, then, at 2 percent or less, brown sugar, sweetened condensed milk, buttermilk, salt, flavours, baking soda and soy lecithin. Five cookies, 32 grams, have 160 calories. The cookies in this recipe are about twice as heavy and come to about 75 calories each by USDA figures.

The boxed cookie is made with vegetable oils. The recipe below uses butter and is a homemade version, not the bakers' formula. MakeFoodLovely is not connected with Girl Scouts of the USA or its bakers.

Recipe

Girl Scout Trefoils (Shortbread Cookies)

A homemade version of Girl Scout Trefoils — butter shortbread rolled thin, cut into 2-inch rounds and baked pale. About forty cookies.

5.0 (1)Print

Prep

20 min

Cook

30 min

Total

1 hr 25 min

Serves

40

Cuisine

American

Ingredients

• 1 cup unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

Instructions

1. Beat the butter, the sugar, the vanilla and the salt for 2 minutes, until smooth and pale.
2. Add the flour and mix on low speed just until the dough comes together in large clumps. Press it into a flat disc, wrap it and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
3. Heat the oven to 325°F and line two baking sheets with parchment.
4. Roll the dough between two sheets of parchment to 1/4 inch thick. Cut out 2-inch rounds and set them 1 inch apart on the baking sheets. Press the scraps together, roll and cut again.
5. Prick each cookie twice with a fork. Bake one sheet at a time for 14 to 16 minutes, until the edges just begin to turn golden and the tops are still pale.
6. Leave the cookies on the sheet for 5 minutes, then move them to a rack to cool completely.

Nutrition

Calories:

75

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Shortbread by weight

Shortbread is traditionally one part sugar, two parts butter and three to four parts flour, with no leavening, as Wikipedia's article describes it. This recipe sits close to that: by weight about 100 grams of sugar, 227 of butter and 280 of flour. Slightly less flour than the classic keeps the dough soft enough to roll thin.

Without baking powder or soda the cookies do not puff. A pattern pressed into the rounds with a cookie stamp before baking stays sharp.

Why the dough is chilled and baked pale

• Cold dough keeps its edge. Butter that is soft when it goes into the oven melts before the flour sets, and the rounds spread. In a warm kitchen, chill the cut cookies on their sheet for 10 minutes.
• 325°F, not 350°F. Shortbread is baked through without browning. The lower oven gives the centre time to dry before the edges colour.
• Stop mixing when the flour is in. Long mixing develops gluten, and the cookies turn tough instead of crumbly.
• The fork holes let steam out, so the tops stay flat.

Where the cookie comes from

According to History.com, a Girl Scout director in Chicago, Florence E. Neil, published a cookie recipe for troops to bake and sell in the magazine The American Girl in July 1922. Shortbread, today's Trefoils, was one of three flavours on sale by 1951.

Brown sugar, lemon, chocolate

• Brown sugar: replace 2 tablespoons of the sugar with light brown sugar, an ingredient on the box.
• Lemon: beat the finely grated zest of 1 lemon into the butter.
• Chocolate-dipped: melt 4 ounces of semisweet chocolate, dip half of each cooled cookie and let it set on parchment.

For a gluten-free cookie from the same range, see the Toffee-tastic copy.

Tin, refrigerator, freezer

The cookies keep two weeks in a closed tin at room temperature. The dough keeps 3 days in the refrigerator and 2 months in the freezer; thaw it in the refrigerator overnight before rolling.

Other Girl Scout cookies on this site are the Thin Mints and the caramel delight cookies.