Making Whoopie (pies)

Once upon a time, many years ago, the Whoopie Pie and the Devil Dog were snacks for kids that once were made in factories and bought in shops. They were originally available pretty much only in New England, or at least the northeast of the USA, but I hear they’ve spread out since then.

Then the other day I was meandering through a collection of recipes I had snipped out of publications or received from various sources, and there I found three recipes hand written by my mother. I have plenty of others she sent me, but I didn’t remember ever receiving these three. All three are for sweet snack foods that kids like to eat after school. That brought it all back to me. My mother and I both had small children at the same time, because my baby sister is only five years older than eg. When my mother found a recipe for making at home a popular snack food previously made in a factory, she sent it to me so I could make it for my little girl. I never made it. I don’t remember why. But I remember what they were supposed to taste like!

Just for the heck of it I made them. A little too late for eg, but not for little Annagiulia who lives up the driveway. They were easy to make, although as I went through the recipe I was amazed that anyone figured out that this was the way to copycat Whoopie Pies. The chocolate cake part is extremely moist and tender and it tends to stick to whatever it touches. That makes for a bumpy and not so perfect surface. By itself it tasted like cheap chocolate cake. The filling was inexplicable. Not a frosting, not a cream, not a pudding, it’s probably is the true ancestor to Cool Whip. It needed to be fluffy but not very soft so it wouldn’t squish out when you bit into the cake. It worked. It also needed to not spoil in a lunchbox. By itself it didn’t taste like much of anything.

Together they taste exactly as I recall Whoopie Pies. And that’s not bad. Not bad at all.

While this is not health food, it is real food. If you want to keep them to serve out one by one, slide each one into a cellophane bag like they did at the factory. Seal it and freeze it. The eater gets to lick the part of the cake that sticks to the cellophane– see? I remember these well.

Whoopie Pie cakes
preheat the oven to 175C or 350F

1/2 cup (50 g) cocoa
1/2 cup (125 ml) hot water
Mix these together into a slurry.

In a big bowl put
1-1/2 cups (315 g) sugar
1/2 cup (125 g) room temperature butter
2 eggs
Beat together until creamy and light.

2-3/4 cups (363.5 g) flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon
should be beaten into the batter, then add
1 teaspoon of vinegar to 1/2 cup (125 ml) milk
and beat that in, too.
Stir in 1 teaspoon vanilla extract.

Cover a baking sheet with baking paper or parchment, and drop smallish spoonsful of the batter on it, leaving space between for the cakes to spread out, and they do spread out quite a bit. I’d say a scant (62 ml) 1/4 cup of batter spreads to about 4″ wide! Bake 10-15 minutes, until they are no longer shiny and when gently pressed the fingerprint pops right back up. Remove to a cooling rack with a spatula and allow to cool thoroughly. This recipe will make about 18 or so cakes.

Filling

in a small pot put:
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup (125 ml) milk
pinch of salt.

Cook and stir briskly until it forms a stiff paste. Remove from the heat and cool completely. It isn’t a bad idea to chill it. I did this while the cakes cooked so that it was cool by the time I had to work with it.

In a medium bowl, cream together
1/2 cup (125 g) butter
1/2 cup (105 g) sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

When it is smooth, scrape the paste you made into the bowl and with a mixer beat it until it is light and fluffy. My mother’s notes recommend that you make one and a half recipes for a more generous filling, but I did not.

Use a silicon or rubber spatula to spread a 1/4 inch or 1 cm layer of this filling on one of the cakes, close it with another so it looks like a chocolate hamburger. Continue until they are all done. Feed to hungry children or others you find wandering around saying “What’s that?”

Annagiulia polished off two instantly and then took a dish of them to keep for the next day. Her mother and grandmother loved them, too, and Olga was enthusiastic way beyond the amount of effort I put in. I think we’ve got a 100% thumbs up rating! And that in spite of the fact that I didn’t listen to mother and therefore made a bunch of ungainly, huge cakes that flowed into each other and came out square the first batch.

The photo above is dedicated to a big boy birthday for Larry. The Italians decimated the Whoopie Pie supply, so he was forced to settle for something fudgie with coffee ice cream instead. (It’s the thought that counts!)