It’s a magical time of year. Or is it times of year? It’s hard to say for those who have never belonged to the Girl Scouts of America, but every now and then someone will drop the chocolate-covered, peanut-buttery, thinnish-minty bomb that Girl Scout cookies are for sale. Your Mountain Times staffers are either too old or male to join the Girl Scouts, but that doesn’t stop us from scrounging our hard-earned Roosevelt dimes to go halfsies on a scrumptious box of Peanut Butter Patties. As journalists, we’re more accustomed to just peanuts, but, in celebration of the Girl Scouts, their well-baked initiative and cookies in general, here are some of our favorite doughy confections.

Frank Ruggiero: Cookies… in cereal!

Admit it. You’re kooky for Cookie Crisp.

Growing up, I loved the breakfast cereal. Since I’m older now, I’m bound by elder doctrine to add “the” before certain nouns. But the breakfast cereal always played a major role as part of my well-balanced breakfast. Balanced, I suppose, is the keyword, implying some semblance of nutrition is involved when breaking one’s fast. This means that parents seldom let their younger tikes draft their own breakfast menus, such as fried waffles smeared with chocolate syrup, peanut butter and sprinkles, which is likely now available at your local Hardee’s. While typical parents would scoff at such a suggestion, the folks at General Mills have seemed to embrace it by way of Cookie Crisp – breakfast cereal consisting of miniature chocolate chip cookies. Just add milk.

I recall first seeing a commercial for the cereal when I was six, featuring the cartoon Cookie Crook being pursued by the relentless Officer Crumb, also known as the Cookie Cop. Though the Cookie Crook may never have gotten away with the loot (cookies), the animated ne’er-do-well stole the hearts and jacked the appetites of children nationwide. With taglines like “Little cookies you can’t resist” and “It’s like lots and lots of little chocolate chip cookies for breakfast,” what else could one expect? While I was captivated by the concept, my parents weren’t swayed. They opted for Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch and Lucky Charms. Sure, all had enough sugar to twice cover a ski slope, but none were quite as blatant about it as Cookie Crisp. To my elementary chagrin, our cabinets were seldom stocked with Crisp, as the neighborhood dough-heads called it, but this merely served to double my pleasure when my folks would indulge my cookie cravings with a bowl or two. And you can darn sure bet I drank the milk.

Caroline Monday: The Girl Scout Experience

My 10 years as a Girl Scout may make my selection of favorite cookie somewhat biased. Not only are Girl Scout cookies incredibly delicious (my favorites are the Peanut Butter Patties), they also played a major role in my childhood.

I remember when my parents would take my sister and me door to door to sell cookies in the neighborhood. No adult was safe from our solicitation, whether they be our school teachers, members of our church, relatives or my parents’ coworkers.

Reminiscing on cookie sales with my mother, she reminded me of one especially prosperous year during the time when she had returned to college to become a CPA. We approached her professors and one of them bought enough cookies to earn the name “Dr. Niceperson,” a derivative of his real name, Dr. Nicewater.

In addition to the cookie selling experience, the proceeds of those sales went toward troop activities that dramatically broadened my horizons and shaped the way I think about the world and my place in it.

We would take trips that went beyond your typical camp out (though we still had plenty of those). My troop would go skiing or white water rafting. We traveled to Washington, D.C., and Savannah, the birth place of Girl Scouts. We did volunteer projects throughout the community.

Thanks to the Girl Scouts, independence and a sense of civic responsibility were instilled in me and my companions at a young age. When I was the only kid in my class, male or female, to have gone rappelling, it became clear that my gender should not play a part in my decisions to seek out adventure; nor should it be a reason to second guess my abilities.

I can’t help but look back at some of the things I have done in my adult life (my career, travels in as distant places as China and volunteering with OASIS, just to name a few) and think about how much my childhood experiences influenced me. Girl Scout cookies may be rich in flavor, but they helped me, and thousands of other girls, lead rich lives.

Mark Mitchell: A Fresh-Baked Cure-All

Cookies, milk and a classic western go together like Lee Van Cleef and glaring.

It’s impossible! You are now reading the words of a self-confessed sugar junkie. Asking me to pick one favorite cookie is like asking a parent to pick a favorite child. This concept is, as the great Vizzini exclaimed in the classic film The Princess Bride, “inconceivable.”

Okay, since we have identified that I cannot have a monogamous relationship with just one cookie, let’s create the mood in which my cookies of choice are enjoyed. Warm, right out of the oven, and with a large glass of milk. To say that this treat is best enjoyed while wearing pajamas and curled up on the sofa with a classic western on the tube goes without saying. This combination is unbeatable. Whether it’s enduring a bad day at work, finding out that your check engine light equates to an empty wallet light ... warm cookies and milk will heal what ails you.

Melanie Davis: Just the dough, please

You know you want it.

Mmmmm... cookies. I absolutely love to cook, however, I do not bake for one single reason. OK, two reasons if you count last Thanksgiving’s exploding pie episode. Raspberries, blackberries and strawberries everywhere - my oven resembled a slaughterhouse for innocent fruit. It took working in shifts to clean that mess.

Back to my baking boycott, cookies and brownies, once mixed, do not ever find their way to the oven in my house. The baking pan is intercepted by a wooden spoon. Who can deny the tempting creaminess of uncooked batter or dough?

Once the ingredients are mixed, or even better – just the tube of chocolate chip cookie dough, I suddenly become an addict, unable to control the impulse to lick the bowl.

Like any addiction, it accelerates. I have now discovered the joy of pouring fudge syrup on chocolate chip cookie dough. I am quite certain this is unhealthy.

I hear my grandma’s voice in the background warning, “You’ll get worms if you eat raw eggs.” I do not know the validity of this claim, having never researched it. The cookie dough industry warns customers not to eat it raw, but who listens to them? Life is about risks.

I have eaten my fair share of dough without becoming ill. Although, raw eggs and salmonella aside, a sugar-crash awaits the guilty.

And thus, I have given up my cookie-dough, and equally tempting brownie mix, addiction. Fudge-covered sugar does seem to counteract my exercise regiment, and I believe health advocates promoting a raw diet do not include eggs.

Now, I must settle for the occasional chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream treat, in which the eggs are fully pasteurized and safe for consumption. It takes all the fun out of rebellious bowl-licking.

Scott Nicholson: Cookies to the Next Level

Try to resist buying Girl Scout cookies from Miranda. We dare you.

Being the parental shepherd of a seven-year-old who looks dangerously cute in a Brownie vest, I have to balance my discouraging her career as a corporate shill against the crumbly deliciousness of cookies. In other words, I am stuck buying as many boxes as it takes to get her to the “next level.” Which basically means she gets to choose as many boxes of cookies as she wants, and this year the new CinnaSpins are the simply-must-haves.

Personally, I like the Caramel deLites, which had to twist away from their former nomenclature of Samoas for some sort of politically sensitive reasoning, although the nation of Caramel and the minor dukedom of deLite are allegedly filing grievances against the Girls Scouts of America Council over the registered trademark. Actually, the different name brands are made by different companies, though the cookies taste the same otherwise, despite the split in geography. Can the island territory of Do-Si-Do break from their pacific nature and also mount a challenge?

Jeff Eason: An Old-Fashioned Kind of Cookie

When it comes to cookies, I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. Give me a homemade molasses cookie, ginger snap or lemon wafer, and I’m in heaven. I remember when I was in kindergarten, we had to bring baked goods to class for our holiday parties. My mom would make chocolate chip cookies using M&Ms instead of chocolate chips. These kinds of cookies are old-hat nowadays, but were on the cutting edge of cookie technology in the mid-60s. For years, I claimed that my mom invented the idea. A little research, however, revealed that she used a recipe that was printed on the side of the large bag of M&Ms.

Over the years I’ve tasted just about every cookie on the market. IMHO, the Oreo is the most overrated cookie ever developed. The outer part doesn’t really taste like chocolate and the middle part tastes like a 50/50 mixture of lard and white sugar. There used to be a cookie called the Hydrox that was similar to the Oreo, but Sunshine Biscuits stopped making it about five years ago. It had a wafer that wasn’t as good as the Oreo’s, but an inside cream that had a unique coconut flavor.

My favorite Girl Scout cookies are the Caramel deLites, which are little rings of wafer, caramel, chocolate and coconut. Caramel deLites used to be called Samoas. I don’t know why the name was changed a couple of years ago but I suspect it was a politically correct move designed to appease the powerful Samoan-American cookie-eating lobby.