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‘Tis the season to start shelling out some major dough to buy presents for friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, distant relatives… Need we go on? However, if you’re a crafty gift-giver with some extra time, you can save the dough and bake some awesome presents. These treats are made to impress, so no one will accuse you of being cheap, though you may be.
This week’s Fresh Baked Gifts is a handheld dessert that’s perfect for Thanksgiving. The whoopie pie has been a popular east coast treat for hundreds of years. The tale goes that when Amish men would open their lunch pails to see what their wives packed, they would shout “Whoopie!” if the cookie sandwich was included. For our purposes, we took the traditional chocolate cookie-cake and turned it pumpkin, with cinnamon cream cheese filling.
The recipe for our Pumpkin whoopie pies were taken from the baking master, Martha Stewart
The ingredients.
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We combined the dry and wet ingredients in separate bowls and then mixed them together in the same bowl. We had a little trouble keeping the pumpkin contained in the can or the bowl, though.
After dolloping the batter on the parchment paper, the cookies are ready to bake. Martha suggests using an ice cream scoop to make the cookies a uniform size. We like using a big spoon to make our cookies look more homemade.
Once you get the cookies out of the oven, it’s important to let them cool all the way so the filling doesn’t turn into a soupy mess between the cookies. This took us a whoopie pie to figure out, but we didn’t make the same mistake again.
We added cinnamon to our cream cheese filling, but we might just be obsessed with cinnamon. Now put the filling in the fridge for about ten to 20 minutes, just to make sure it holds up to the sandwiching process.
The finished product, smushed together into a delicious cookie sandwich. We took these to one of our favorite dance studios, Al Moro, for Chocolate Night, and the cookies were promptly gobbled up by several hungry belly dancers.
You can cut these bad boys in half and serve, or for a more wrapped feeling, get some press and seal cling wrap and wrap each one individually. It will no doubt be the fanciest moon pie your friends have ever eaten.
Stay tuned next week, sugar rushers, for the cupcake to end all other cupcakes.
This post was edited after publishing.
