Maine · Dessert
Whoopie Pies
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a floral thread lifting the aroma, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 250g flour
- 60g cocoa powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 115g butter, softened
- 200g brown sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 240ml buttermilk
- For the filling: 115g butter, 200g icing sugar, 175g marshmallow creme, 1 tsp vanilla
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Creaming butter & sugarThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Whisk flour, cocoa, soda, and salt.
- Cream butter and brown sugar until light; beat in egg and vanilla.
- Alternate the dry ingredients and buttermilk into the butter in three additions.
- Drop heaped tablespoons onto lined trays, well spaced, and bake at 190C for 10-12 min until they spring back. Cool completely. 12 min
- Beat the filling ingredients smooth, then sandwich pairs of cakes generously.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Creaming butter & sugar 28 recipes
- The butter started at the right temperature: it took a fingerprint and held its shape, neither greasy and slumping nor hard from the fridge.
- It has visibly paled, from yellow towards near-white, and grown in volume, and getting there took minutes rather than seconds.
- The texture is light and aerated: a spoonful is fluffy and holds a soft peak rather than sitting dense on the spoon.
- Rubbed between finger and thumb it is still faintly gritty with undissolved sugar, and not slick or oily.
- It is one homogeneous cream: not split, slackened, or separating into a greasy mass with liquid running out of it.
Where it goes wrong The butter was too warm, or it was beaten well past its point, so the fat softened and gave up the air it had taken: the mixture goes slack and oily and the cake bakes dense and greasy with a sunken middle.
The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake 135 recipes
- Tested at the true centre and the thickest point, not at the convenient edge: the edge is done long before the answer is.
- The skewer comes out as the recipe describes, clean and dry or carrying the stated moist crumb, and it does the same on a second test in a different spot.
- The wobble is read in motion: nudged, the centre moves as one set mass with a faint tremble, rather than a liquid ripple travelling across the surface.
- The other signs agree with the test: risen and just shrinking from the sides, the top set and dry to a light touch with no wet gloss on it.
- Pressed lightly at the middle it springs back and leaves no lasting dent.
Where it goes wrong It was judged on the clock and on how the edges looked, so a centre still liquid went to the rack and sank as it cooled, a dense wet seam under a perfectly browned top.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Banyuls or Ruby Port
- Also Right
- PX Sherry
- From the Taps
- Imperial stout
- Zero-Proof
- Espresso
Chocolate wants fortified sweetness or roast-bitter contrast: the wine must out-sweet the plate, or oppose it entirely.
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