Pumpkin Whoopie Pies
Pumpkin pie, the Thanksgiving staple, is controversial at our house. I love it and think it is creamy, sweet and delicious. My husband abhors it and finds it slimy, disgusting, and strangely textured. For years, I have tried different variations on pumpkin pie so that we can incorporate it in our Thanksgiving meal.
One year it was pumpkin cheesecake. That was the year that I learned that cheesecake is a complicated dessert to make. All of my mini cheesecakes fell in the center and looked sad and unappetizing. They tasted OK but certainly nothing we would ever want to repeat.
This year, I learned about pumpkin whoopie pies from the Metrocurean blog. Could this be the answer to our pumpkin problems? I reviewed a few recipes and decided to try Martha Stewart’s version from Matt Lewis of Baked Bakery.
Normally, I am a bit wary of trying recipes from real chefs. I have horrible memories of trying to cook from a gourmet magazine as a teenager–spending hours in the kitchen only to have the dish turn out completely inedible and nothing remotely like the picture.
Fortunately, Martha’s recipe is pretty foolproof. It came out looking quite a bit like the picture. I was worried when the cookie batter was quite runny and drizzled it in puddles on the cookie sheet to bake. Fortunately, the cookies came out of the oven puffed up, moist and soft and were relatively flat, which makes assembly into the whoopie pies easier.
My girls loved to eat the cookie tops plain, which, for my eldest was a major success in adding to her limited, picky diet. The remaining cookies were glued together with cream cheese frosting middles (the leftover frosting was seen here in the Election Cakes). I thought they were delicious. But the big test was seeing whether my pumpkin pie-hating husband would eat them.
SUCCESS!
He loved them and ate several. This may be our new Thanksgiving dessert tradition. I encourage you to try them.
P.S. If you wanted a super-easy version of this recipe, you could try mixing a can of pumpkin pie filling with a box of spice cake mix for the cookies. A friend brought cookies made from this recipe to a cookie exchange once and they were moist and delicious.