A Whole Lot of Whoopie, Pies That Is.

  Hey guys, so this is actually a guest post I did last month so I thought I would come here and share it all in case you missed it and, you know, it makes up for the fact I have not been able to bake for a bit. I will for sure this weekend, promise!  So enjoy, and try to ignore the worse than usual pictures, I try to.

  So I wanted to do something fun and easy, but something that you could really make bigger and better, you know?  So I decided I would make whoopie pies, but not just any whoopie pies.  I wanted to show you how to make itty, bitty, teeny weeny little pies.  Why?  Well firstly, whoopie pies are awesome, secondly anything small is automatically cuter, and thirdly, with minis you can eat way more and try different flavours.  So it is a win win all around!

This is how it all starts, me measuring everything out and being all ready to just toss it in the mixer.

  I am going to show you how I make my mini pies, and I will include the recipe for the vanilla ones I made, I will link you back to posts where I made the chocolate and red velvet ones.  So this is a three in one deal!

  To get started, I used recipes from the book "Whoopies" because it is the best thing ever , really a must have for whoopie pies.

  As I was baking in bulk, think four batches, I started out with my mes en place.  That is fancy talk for having your crap all together.  So this means I measure out and sift all my dry ingredients together and then put out all the wet ingredients then I get to work.  So here is the recipe for vanilla whoopie pies,  I doubled it because I wanted lots, and I ended up with way too many.  If there can ever be too many whoopies you know?

Obviously these are chocolate, but I was not thinking when I was in the throws of whoopie pie making and this is the picture I took.  Sorry.

Vanilla Whoopie pies
From the book Whoopies  by Susanna Tee
-1/2 cup butter
-1 cup sugar
-1 TSP vanilla
-1 extra large egg
-2 1/3 cups all purpose flour
-1 1/4 TSP baking soda
-pinch of salt
-1 cup butter milk ( I use regular milk, just put a TSP of vinegar in your measuring cup, then fill to the 1 cup line, then stir and let sit for 5 minutes, and you have butter milk!)



Set your oven to 375, or if you have a convection oven 350.

Start by creaming the butter, sugar and vanilla together.  Once creamed, add your egg.  Then once the egg is fully incorporated you add the dry ingredients.  Once they are all in there, and trust me the dough will be crumbly and thick, slowly add the butter milk.  Then mix well and get ready to scoop.

See they spread out a bit, and remember you are using two of these and icing, they are a mouth full!

For these minis I used my tiny little ice cream scoop.  I mean it is small, like 1 TSP small.  It doesn't look like much, but trust me it will be perfect.  So I scoop them out, onto a parchment lined cookie sheet, leaving room for spreading and then bake them for about 5 minutes.  You know they are done when you notice they are no longer wet looking on top, and maybe they are browning just the tiniest bit.  Then take them out of the oven, and let sit for a few minutes before removing them to a cooling rack to finish cooling.

As I was making hundreds I just put them all in cake pans to store.  Please ignore the three large ones in there, those were to be used as taste testers.  I think testing is important.

I think I got about 180 whoopie halves out of this batch, but I was doing 4 different ones, and since I doubled the batch and since I was at this for hours, I lost count, but trust me you get lots!  You can also make them larger with a TBSP size cookie scoop, but that seems to be huge to me, and then I can hardly even eat one, so you know, you choose. So you should get around 80 halves in a regular batch.

Now for the filling I made a few different ones.  For these pies I made two.  A basic chocolate butter cream, and a vanilla butter cream with chocolate pearls.  But it was all one recipe and so easy.

Basic butter cream:
based on me just putting stuff in a bowl and mixing it all up

(this should be more than enough to fill two batches of minis, with lots of icing)

1/2 cup butter
1-2 TBSP Vanilla Bean Paste, or just regular vanilla
milk and icing sugar to add as you need.

-cream the butter and vanilla until creamy, then add about 1/4 cup of milk
-add icing sugar until it is thick enough for what you want, if you feel there is not enough just add milk 1 TBSP at a time then more sugar.  I know it's not exact, but I never do things the right way you know.

Now using this basic butter cream you can change it up however you like.  For my chocolate I just put in cocoa powder until it looked dark enough for me, about 1/4 cup.  And then to make the vanilla with sugar pearls, I just added these chocolate covered rice puffs, they stay nice and crispy but add a little something. Just add as many as you like, I think I added almost 3/4 of a cup.

This was a great find, they were at the outlet store for under $20, and they are yummy!  Little puffs of rice covered in chocolate.

So you can be very organized and lay out all your whoopie halves and what not, like I usually do, or you can just do whatever.  I suggest laying them out, it is much faster.  So lay out your bottoms, wrong side up, and fill with frosting, you can scoop it, or use a piping bag.  I found the frosting with the pearls was really hard to pipe so I used a disposable piping bag and just cut a huge hole in the end for it.

You don't have to pipe it all nice, you won't really see it. Also  I usually do this on a large piece of parchment paper, but I was tired and just wanted to get them done.  Hundreds of whoopies will do that to you.

Once you have filled them, just put the other half on top and press them together to make the icing spread out and stick together.  If you want you can then roll the sides in sprinkles or sugar to look pretty.  I would have, but after whoopie number 200 I was just tired and wanted to be done.

You can store them in the fridge in a container or leave them out for the day for a party.  The only thing that would go bad is the butter cream but you have a good day before you need to worry.  If you make cream cheese icing, I would keep those in the fridge until you are ready to serve.

These are the red velvet ones I made.   I sort of just stacked them together in a cake pan to take them to my moms.

I hope you enjoy these and try them out, I love that you can make so many different combinations, like adding  things to the batter.  I have done banana chocolate chip, chocolate chocolate chip, chocolate with crushed whoopers, and well you can do anything!  Be creative. 

And this is the party picture my Mom took, I was at work, and well, they look sort of bad, but they tasted great!