Whoopie!!

Having only ever eaten one whoopie pie in my life and being really behind the times, when thinking what to bake for Bonfire, for some random reason I decided to try a whoopie pie for the first time. They're so last year (or two or three) darling but hey ho!

But what is a whoopie pie some may be asking? Well it's half cake, half cookie, so not hard but not soft like a bun. The name whoopie pie comes from years back when Amish farmers would find the treats in their lunch and would shout "Whoopie".

November to me is Parkin month. I wanted to try and find a recipe that combined Parkin with the whoopie pie but they don't exist online and I left it too late to come up with my own recipe. One flavour of Parkin though is ginger so I thought Gingerbread whoopie pies might be nice. I settled on an American recipe as a lot of recipes contain buttermilk and I'd already been shopping so ideally wanted a store cupboard recipe. And this one was. I noticed though it was in the dreaded cups which I thought might be ok but the flour was measured in ounces. Eek. Stress! But the website had an easy conversion button on it and voila. One press and all my dreams came true.

Here we go:

280g plain flour

100g caster sugar

120g dark muscovado sugar

2 1/2 tsp ginger

1 1/4 tsp baking powder (recipe said baking soda-no idea if that's baking powder or bicarbonate of soda so I plumped for baking powder)

1 tsp cinnamon

3/4 tsp salt 

80ml vegetable oil

1 egg

80ml boiling water 

Preheat the oven to 180c fan

Line baking sheets with grease proof paper.

Combine the flour, white sugar, muscovado, ginger, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt together in a large bowl. Mix in the vegetable oil and egg until combined. Pour in the boiling water and whisk until smooth. It makes a very thick sticky batter.

Drop in spoonfuls (huh?) onto the baking sheets. I had no idea how big they were supposed to be so just guessed.

See how thick and gloopy they look? I was getting a bit nervous by this point.

Bake in the oven for 12-14 minutes and allow to cool on the sheets for 5 minutes before removing to a cooling rack.

For the filling I decided to just make a spiced buttercream. I have no idea of quantities as I generally make my buttercream from taste, mixing icing sugar with butter. I added a tsp of ginger and a tsp of cinnamon then some orange food colouring as I wanted it to be orange for some random reason.

So here we are. My mahoosive gingerbread whoopie pies.

But I wasn't done. I had a bit of filling leftover and just got some gorgeous mini teeny weeny sparkly gingerbread men from Sainsbos so decided to put a swirl of filling on top and top with three gingerbread men. How very festive of me!

No idea if everyone else liked them but I liked mine and looking forward to making a chocolate version. I'm thinking chocolate and cherry or chocolate and orange. Any takers!