Making Whoopie

I've never eaten a Whoopie Pie but it's something that I have always wanted to try.  What could be wrong about not one, but two light cake-like cookies with a creamy frosting sandwiched in the middle?  Although I was looking forward to being completely lazy today I couldn't keep myself out of the kitchen so I decided today was as good a day as any for making my first whoopie pies.

On the site allrecipes.com I found a recipe for pumpkin whoopie pies and since I happened to have some pumpkin on hand and my favorite cookies are my mom's pumpkin chocolate chip I figured I would give them a try.  I got my ingredients together and started mixing.

2 cups packed brown sugar

1 cup vegetable oil

1 1/2 cups solid pack pumpkin puree ( used one whole can of pumpkin, it's a little more than called for but this way I wasn't wasting any and the cookies had a little more pumpkin flavor)

2 eggs

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 1/2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

1/2 tablespoon ground ginger

1/2 tablespoon ground cloves

I preheated the oven to 350 and started by mixing the oil and sugar and then added the pumpkin and flour, once that was well incorporated I added the rest of the ingredients and mixed some more.

The recipe called for dropping a few teaspoons of batter onto a cookie sheet but I used a scoop instead to get more uniform cookies.  I also lined my cookie sheets with parchment instead of greasing the sheets.  I used the large Pampered Chef scoop but next time I think I'd use the medium one as the cookies turned out a bit large. 

I popped them in the oven and about 10-12 minutes later they were done (when they spring back if you touch them on top).  I placed them on racks to cool off for a bit.  They turned out really nice and light but next time I would flatten out the batter a bit before baking because they were pretty round on top and not quite as flat as a whoopie pie should be.

Once the cookies had cooled I started on the frosting.  I wasn't really excited about the frosting in the recipe so I decided to make something else.  I was thinking about doing a basic cream cheese frosting but I wanted something a little lighter (in texture not necessarily in calories) so I decided to mix in some marshmallow.  I didn't have any marshmallow fluff on hand so I started with some regular marshmallows.

1/2 bag marshmallows (or 1 jar of marshmallow fluff)

8oz cream cheese, softened

2 cups powdered sugar

1 tsp vanilla

I started by melting the marshmallows in the microwave (about a minute).  Then I mixed in the cream cheese and added the sugar and vanilla.  I mixed until all the sugar was incorporated.  You could probably add more sugar to make the frosting a little thicker as mine was still a little thin. 

Once the frosting was done I added couple tablespoons to the flat side of a cookie and sandwiched another cookie on top.