Whoopie Pies!

 For a long time I have been wanting to make Whoopie Pies.  An occasion offered itself and I finally made them!  (An Elders' Quorum/Relief Society Council meeting...) 

To prepare I had purchased a quart bottle of buttermilk.  It amazes me how easy it is to find buttermilk in the grocery stores here in the South. When we were back in Vermont buttermilk was only "easy" to acquire  by making butter from your own cow and saving the buttermilk. Which we did pretty often for the seventeen years we had family cows.

Whoopie Pies

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon table salt
• 1/2 cup butter at room temperature
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line two baking sheets with parchment. Set aside.

In  the bowl of a KitchenAid mixer, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well.

 Stop to scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed.

With a 2-Tablespoon cookie scoop, plop piles on the baking sheets, 12 to each sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until the tops are puffed and a toothpick inserted into the center of one of the cakes comes out clean. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. 

Filling

1/2 cup room temperature butter (here I would have preferred shortening but did not have any since generally I do not use that stuff)

2 cups marshmallow creme/fluff

2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla (in this case homemade vanilla from my sister. I have a richness of homemade vanilla in our cupboard  because a sweet friend gave us two bottles at Christmas time.  So happy.  So sad that I am not baking very often lately.)

Mix all together in a clean KitchenAid bowl and whip until very smooth and fluffy.

Spoon filling onto half of the whoopie pies then top with a second whoopie pie.

These were pretty good.  Sadly I ate one at 9:00 PM along with a glass of milk ( sadly because eating after supper is something I am trying to avoid like the plague BUT  after the Council attendees were kind enough to take whoopie pies home to their families and there were only two to take home myself, well, Dear One only ate one so...I ate the other.) and in the morning had a very unpleasant surprise when I checked blood sugar...

If I were actually to make these again, I would at least quadruple the filling so they would more closely resemble the whoopie pies I remember from the Quechee Mobil station in Vermont!