Cookie Carnival

This is my first time participating in the Cookie Carnival, a monthly event organised by Kate from the Clean Plate Club. Each month a cookie is selected and everyone bakes it. This month’s is pumpkin whoopie pies. You can find the recipe here on the Martha Stewart website. This is complete first for me – first time baking for the cookie carnival and also the first time I have made or even tasted whoopee pies.

Whoopie pies are almost like little cakes – they have the consistency of a ginger kiss or a sponge drop and are joined together with icing. The icing of the pumpkin whoopie pies was cream cheese based – I am not sure if that is a common feature or not. As we don’t have canned pumpkin puree in NZ, I steamed and mashed pumpkin. It isn’t pumpkin season here at the moment, so the pumpkins have lost a bit of their sweetness and are a bit dry – but it didn’t matter too much for these pies. I did have to add a lot more icing sugar to the icing to get it the right consistency. I am not sure whether others had this problem – it may be a symptom of the recipe being a Martha Stewart one, as I know some others do have problems with the quantities in her recipes. My icing isnt the bright orange of Martha's either - not sure if this is because of the amount of icing sugar I used or because I used real pumpkin as opposed to canned.

I am not sure if I love whoopie pies – I think I would prefer a small cake or something with cream! Although, there is a recipe on Martha’s site for peanut butter whoopie pies – that sounds like my kind of thing!