So, these homemade whoopie pies were a huge success. These are chocolate, with a fancy sweetened mascarpone cheese frosting in the middle. For any of you who have never had whoopie pies (Is that possible? Maybe?) they are like two cupcake tops with a filling. They are messy to eat, comforting, and wonderful. You don't need a fancy tin to bake them—I used an ice cream scoop for the dough and it worked great.
The recipes for both the cookies and filling are in this stupidly cute new book, Whoopie Pies
The book is really clever. There is a section for the cake recipes and a section for all the filling recipes—you can mix and match. Of course they provide suggestions. I love the classic marshmallow filling with chocolate, but I was intrigued by the mascarpone filling (which they flavor with lemon but I kept it plain because I was pairing it with the chocolate cookies.)
Two very important things I must note:
1. All the cookie recipes (which are really just like a cupcake top) call for shortening and butter. They say this is a must. I disagree fully, and used all butter in all my batches so far with great success.
2. They provide the classic filling for a chocolate whoopie pie as shortening mixed with purchased Marshmallow Fluff. I love marshmallow filling so much, but I'm not down with this. I am totally fine eating it if I buy it somewhere, or whatever, but I'm not going to make it this way at home. So, what bums me out is they don't provide a homemade marshmallow filling—which can just be a 7-minute frosting. So, when I want a more classic whoopie pie, that's the filing I use—a homemade 7-minute frosting. You have to work fast when using this, by the way. I haven't tried freezing them with the marshmallow filling yet, but with a buttercream or mascarpone filling, they freeze beautifully after they are assembled.
Okay, I did make homemade mascarpone cheese for the filling. This might seem a little crazy, but really, it's so easy to make, and I was looking for an excuse to make some from scratch. It was heavenly and the extra I stirred into mac and cheese. Wow. It's also wonderful on strawberries. All you need is heavy cream, lemon juice, and some time.
Here's a vanilla whoopie pie with mascarpone cheese filling and I added a few raspberries when I mixed it up. These were good, too, but so far, the chocolate is my favorite.
In some research I found this—good lordy!
