Also known as…
Samoas Fudge Babies!
No, not the spicy Indian potato thing. That’s a samosa. This is a samoa. You don’t want to get the two confused! 
Awhile back, I posted a recipe for Raw Thin-Mint Brownies.
In that post, I vowed to someday try making raw samoas, my favorite girl-scout cookies as a child.
Gosh, my children are pretty.
Certainly prettier than those poor Thin Mint Brownies!
Samoas Babies
- Packed 1/2 cup dates (90g)
- 2 tbsp unsweetened shredded coconut (30g)
- 1/16 tsp pure vanilla extract
- scant 1/8 tsp salt
- 1-2 tbsp chocolate chips or bar (14-28g)
Put all the ingredients together in your food processor, and blend. (I like to make 1/2 a batch and use the Magic Bullet short cup.) You can reserve a few of the chocolate chips to add, post-blending, if you so desire. See below for nutrition information.
Nutrition Facts for Samoas Babies:
Serving Size: 45 grams (the size of a Larabar)
- 175 calories
- 8 g fat
- 2 g protein
- 5 g fiber
- 0 g added sugars
When I set out to create a fudge baby version of the famous Samoas girl-scout cookie, the first thing I did was look up ingredients for the real Samoas.
Do you know what I found?
It wasn’t pretty: Sugar, vegetable oil (partially-hydrogenated palm kernel and/or cottonseed oil, soybean and palm oil), enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), coconut, corn syrup, sweetened condensed milk (condensed milk, sugar), cocoa, sorbitol, glycerin, invert sugar, cocoa processed with alkali,cornstarch, salt, caramelized sugar, dextrose, soy lecithin, carrageenan, leavening, natural and artificial flavor
Anyone want to count how many times some form of sugar is listed in there? (Answer: six)
Sounds more like a science experiment than a cookie. Does anyone else find it upsetting that they’re allowed to produce such cookies and feed them—in bulk—to unsuspecting young girls (not to mention the rest of the population that buys the cookies from the scouts). I just don’t understand…
Why do they have to make junk?
Healthy food can taste delicious, as I say in my About Me page.
So why don’t they make a healthier cookie for the girl scouts to sell? Unfortunately, I know the answer: cost. It’s cheaper for companies to mass-produce cookies with chemical-y ingredients and preservatives than it’d be for them to use real, natural ingredients (i.e. ingredients found in cookies that people would bake at home!). Who ends up suffering? The consumers.
Don’t get me wrong…
I’m not saying that eating a girl-scout cookie every now and then is going to hurt you. I truly believe it’s perfectly healthy for people to occasionally eat unhealthy foods (as long as they don’t stress about it afterwards). Stress over achieving a “perfect” diet seems far worse for one’s health than eating processed junk every once in a while. No, what I’m upset about is the fact that manufacturers are allowed to produce said processed junk in the first place! Yes, America is a free country. But does this mean companies have the right to add to their products whatever unhealthy (and, in some cases, dangerous) ingredients they desire? And then they aggressively target these products towards children?! Marketing and deceptive advertising strategies can fool even the most well-intentioned consumers.
Ah, but I digress. Let’s get back to the fun stuff, shall we?
These are actually nut-free!
I improved upon the recipe after the photo-shoot, which is why the babies in the photos have nuts. (Please don’t take that sentence the wrong way.) Do they taste exactly like samoas cookies? No, but that wasn’t the taste/texture I set out to achieve when making these. They’re not raw samoas, they’re raw samoas fudge babies!
So what do they taste like?
Well, imagine a Samoa-flavored Larabar.
And click for a list of all the Homemade Larabar Flavors.
That first photo is stunning Katie. The recipe sounds great too! 🙂
Haha I’m glad you cleared up the whol ‘samoa’ thing, cos I did think you were talking about samosas! 😛
These look DEEEELISH!! I am so making them asap!! 😀
And I totally agree with you!! I think they especially take advantage of the fact that this stuff is marketed at kids who are much less likely to read or care about ingredients lists! But CCK can and IS changing things, one person at a time, to show everyone that healthy is the new naughty 🙂
Katie I agree with you about the girl scout cookies — nothing is wrong with having them, but it is sad that they are made in the first place! Eek all that sugar.
You know my feelings on coconut, but these look so adorable!
will definitely make some fudge babies soon! (and will hide them from my roomie, so that she won´t gobble them all up like last time ;))
I totally agree! I do NOT understand how they are allowed to put such crap in food. Also, as I am studying marketing myself, I feel so bad about how people using their knowledge the wrong way and knowingly leading people to consume extremely unhealthy products by stupid ads. I mean, come on? Would you do this to your own children/friends/family? But it is not only the industry to blame, it is also the consumers themselves, that don´t want to know what´s inside the food they are buying and just want to believe what they have been told through commercials…
These look delicious! Samoas used to be my favorite Girl Scout cookie! I used to sell cookies door-to-door in my neighborhood.
I do wish we had more cartoon characters on fruits and vegetables, while foods that everyone should eat in moderation came in plain, boring packages.
That would DEFINITELY help! I can remember wanting to buy dunkaroos just because of the kangaroo, those koala chocolates just because of the fun shapes, and even gummy fruit chews or cocoa pops because of the cartoons… it wasn’t even the flavor of these foods that I liked! 🙁
Those look incredible. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t going to go home and make those today. But I am!!!
You know the Sugar free Girl Scout cookies (I don’t remember which type) use xylitol or sorbitol…or something like that to sweeten them, so on the box it says that if you eat too many cookies it’ll have a laxative affect, hehe >.>
I know that because I remember a girl in my class ate about half the box and then wanted to know how much she ate and saw that warning label after XP
LOL oh poor girl! 😕
I always get migraines from eating lots of processed food, and samoas are my all time favorite girl scout cookies <3 will def be making this when we get a food processer in a couple of weeks.
Ha ha, I love the samosas/samoas thing! when you first mentioned samoas a while ago, I had to Google to find out what they were, because all I could think of was samosas!
I really like the bit about healthy food too; I hate the standard “you’ve got to give up everything nice to be healthy” view; whenever I see dieting or healthy eating articles, they always seem to suggest such boring food, when there’s so much out there that’s amazingly healthy AND amazingly delicious – as your Fudge Babies prove 🙂
Oh NO. Do you know how many of these are going to be made and eaten in the next 2 hours at my apartment?!!?! =D