Whoopie Pies

Whoopie pies!!!

       I haven't made these in a while, and since it was the last family cook-out of the year I thought I'd make something a little special to bring.  I looked at all my cook books, and waaay at the end of my enormous stack I found my whoopie pie book that I completely forgot I had!  It sounded like a plan to me.

 Because of my little sister and brother, I have a little trouble getting the names of these things straight now, simply because they both called them something different.  So, I'm just warning you now, if I say "cookie pie", or "whoopie cushion" instead, you can thank Douglas and Jillian for that.  But in the end, thEy came out good, and were a big hit!  Don't forget to comment and tell me what you think!!

I'm getting off topic, what I'm trying to do is show how I made whoopie pies.  Here it goes.....

As usual, I will put all of the ingredient measurements down at the bottom, but for now let me walk you through the steps. ☺ Here I have the brown sugar and soft butter.  Here's a tip, see that one chunk of brown sugar towards the bottom?  That's cause the sugar was starting to dry out a bit, a way to prevent this is to put your brown sugar in the freezer.  It won't stay moist forever, but it will last longer, just take it out 10 minutes before you need it, otherwise it's hard as rock.

  

The butter was really soft, so I was just able to use a spatula to cream them together.

 Add one egg, and the vanilla, mix again!  The consistency should be kinda like peanut butter...

See?

  Here is the flour, baking soda, and salt.  I like this recipe because all you do is throw the wet in, and mix them.  Then you do the same dry and mix them.
 

Now put in the coco powder and milk in.  Here is two tips, one always SIFT your coco powder, nobody like tiny chocolate lumps in floating around.  Also, when ever I see a recipe calls for milk, I use butter milk.  It adds extra richness to anything you make!  Sometimes when I have to make a cake for one of the kids birthday party and I don't have time to make a cake from scratch I use a box mix cake and do some stuff to it to make it REALLY good (I'll have to do a post on that soon).  One of the things I always do is, when the mix calls for water or milk, I always do buttermilk, it's so much better.  I never have buttermilk on hand, so I do a mixture of milk to a little bit of lemon juice or vinegar, you could use plain yogurt too.  Check out my "Back to the Basics" page and you'll see how to do that.

Once you mix it all up, the batter is going to feel like a thick cake batter, or kind of like a cake-like brownie. 

Now you have to line a baking sheet with parchment paper, or you can just spray it with non-stick cooking spray, it doesn't matter.  Either way works.  I have them about 1-1/2 - 2 inches apart because they spread out quite a bit. You'd be surprised how many this recipe for cookie... I mean whoopie makes.

See what I mean?  You'll only get about half of what you see here cause you have to put them together to make little sandwiches.  Besides what you see here, I had about 10-12 more on a plate that didn't fit on the cooling rack.
 

This part takes a few minuets.  You want to match up the whoopies that are closest in size to each other.

I had this frosting left over from the cupcakes I made for Jillian's birthday party that I just used for the whoopie pies.  That's what is so much fun about these things, you can put any kind of filling in the middle of them, and they are different every time!  This is a chocolate butter cream I used here, but you could do the classic way of a marshmallow cream, or anything you wanted, really!  Here is where you can get creative!  Just fill 'em and top 'em!

A little sprinkle of coco powder, and your good to go!

Chocolate whoopie pies: yields 30

1 stick butter, soft

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 t. vanilla

1 extra large egg

2 c. flour

1/2 c. unsweetened coco powder 

1 1/4 t. baking soda

1 c. buttermilk

pinch of salt

CREAM together the butter and sugar in a large bowl until fluffy.  Mix in the egg, vanilla, and salt until well combined.  Add the dry ingredients (don't forget to sift that coco powder!) and the butter milk to the bowl and mix until just combined,.  Don't over mix.  line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and pre=heat the oven to 375°.  Scoop heaping tablespoons full of the mixture onto the lined baking tray and bake fore 5-7 minuets.  or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.  Fill with a frosting, filling or cream of your choice and enjoy.  Store leftovers in a air tight container.