What's Going On With This Girl Scout Cookie Art?

Deconstructing the “accent ingredient.”

It’s almost springtime, the drunk St. Patrick’s Day parades are still happening, and the weather is unseasonably cold. You know what that means: it’s Girl Scout Week!!!!!! It’s COOKIE TIME! Have you already ordered yours? I have not because I’m very busy blogging as you can see. But I spent some time perusing the options. If you navigate over to girlscouts.org and click here on “Meet the Cookies,” you too can learn that there are approximately twice as many types of cookies these days with names that sound like parodies of Girl Scout Cookies. If you put your zip code into the “Find Cookies!” nav bar you can find cookies near you.

But I’m not here to talk about names. Everyone knows that thing about how there are two names for the same cookie and it just depends on which bakery they’re made at. Everyone knows this. Look it up. Fine, here you go:

Why are there two bakers?
Girl Scout councils contract with one of two licensed bakers, whose recipes and ingredients may differ slightly. Contact your local Girl Scout council to find out which baker they partner with.

I’m here to talk about ART. Specifically the images of the cookies and their companion visual accents, the main or highlighted ingredients for each cookie. For the Peanut Butter Patties®/Tagalongs® and the Peanut Butter Sandwich/Do-si-dos®, the accent is obviously a shelled peanut, a perfect little light-brown legume, split down the middle with one of those seductive notches at the top. For the Lemonades™ and the Savannah Smiles® it’s two little eighth-triangles of lemon. For the Thin Mints® it’s a poorly photoshopped sprig of spearmint.

The Shortbread/Trefoils® one is very good and straightforward: a sugar cube.

The gluten-free (!!) Trios are business (oats) in the front, party (peanut and choco chips) in the back:

But what on earth is going on with the s’mores???? There are two types of s’mores. They are both called Girl Scout S’mores™, which is extremely confusing because they look quite different:

Chocolate and marshmallow: very simple. So what the fuck is going on in the right-hand picture? The accent ingredients have been melted into their liquid for and for some reason there is just…a few blobs of viscous, semi-opaque white goo on the naked graham cracker:

The GSA call this “yummy crème icing” but I call this “no.”

Do I have a suggestion for how they could have done this differently? Yes, just put the chunk of chocolate and mini marshmallow just like the normal one. What gives, Little Brownie Bakers? I mean thank goodness someone took the time to give the melted marshmallow jizz some nice angled lighting to give it that beautiful sheen. I bet it’s still warm.

Anyway, how many boxes have you ordered? Sound off in the comments.