June 23, 2024
Summer has finally arrived in New England. The transition from spring to summer brought us windy temps on some days and heat waves on others. The last couple of months have been especially exciting for our family as we traveled extensively throughout the New England area. Just this month, we headed up north to visit friends in Maine. A couple of months ago, in April, we made a special trip up north to New Hampshire and Vermont to witness the April 8th solar eclipse. In May, we headed west to visit some of the hidden gems located throughout the Berkshires. In between these trips, we celebrated our birthdays during the month of May. Since all three of our birthdays land in the month of May, we pretty much celebrated a birthday every week throughout the month of May. For Z’s birthday, we celebrated with an I Love You to The Moon and Back book theme. Here’s a photo from the celebration:
In between work and travels, I’ve been working on developing new recipes to share on my site. One recipe I’ve been working on lately has been my take on a classic New England treat I’ve had on multiple occasions on my trips up north. These treats are of course the cookie-shaped, cream-filled cakes known as whoopie pies. Despite the name, whoopie pies aren’t pies but are actually cakes shaped like giant cookies with cream sandwiched in between. They look pretty much like ginormous Oreo cookies. The ones here in New England are typically chocolate cakes with a marshmallow cream in the center. I find myself gravitating to these dessert pies every time I make a trip up north to Maine. On nearly every trip, we’ve defaulted to having lobster rolls and/or lobster bisque for lunch and rounded out the meal with whoopies pies for dessert. The whoopie pies I’ve eaten on my trips to Maine are always amazing. They are such beloved desserts that there are bakeries dedicated specifically to them. The taste reminds me of some of the packaged chocolate cream-filled snack cakes I would buy from the local grocery stores in Brooklyn throughout my childhood. When I set out to recreate these lovely little snack cakes, I wanted to combine a classic chocolate whoopie pie with the de facto Maine fruit, wild blueberries. Fresh wild blueberries aren’t easy to find where we live, but frozen wild blueberries are easily found in the freezer section of the local Stop & Shop near us. Since chocolate pairs beautifully with blueberries, it was only natural for me to combine my love for chocolate and blueberries into wild blueberry whoopie pies. My version of whoopie pies is a nod to the classic treat and the classic fruit of Maine. The best part about these whoopie pies is the portability. They are easy to tote around as a dessert after a meal, and they make for the perfect little celebration cakes for Z. The slight tartness of the wild blueberries helps to balance out the sweetness of the whoopie pies. Depending on where you get whoopie pies, the cake to filling ratio can vary drastically. Some whoopie pies are filled to the brim with filling, while others are not so much. When I recreated these treats, I tried to keep the ratio of cake to filling somewhere in the middle. Since these cakes are celebration cakes for Z, we wanted to make sure she got a full-size whoopie pie to herself. Z became a fan of these chocolatey treats ever since she set her little teeth on her first whoopie pie on our travels to Maine. When Z turned two last month, I baked up a batch of wild blueberry whoopie pies just for her to enjoy as birthday treats. We wanted her birthday theme this year to be a logical transition from last year’s birthday theme based on the book, The Wonderful Things You Will Be. With our recent travels to see the solar eclipse, I felt inspired to create a moon-themed birthday celebration. The logical choice was another one of Z’s favorite children’s book, I Love You to the Moon and Back. We obviously replaced “to” with “2” to keep with the 2nd birthday theme. As you can see in the photos throughout this post, Z thoroughly enjoyed her share of the wild blueberry whoopie pies on her birthday. She even asked for more of these little chocolate cakes on the days after her birthday.
For the whoopie pies:
(makes six large cream-filled whoopie pies)
For the cakes:
· ¾ cup whole milk
· 2 tablespoons lemon juice
· 2 cups all-purpose flour
· ½ cup cocoa powder
· 1 teaspoon baking powder
· 1 teaspoon baking soda
· ½ teaspoon salt
· ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
· 1 cup dark brown sugar
· 1 large egg
· 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
· ½ cup frozen wild blueberries, thawed and lightly mashed
For the filling:
· 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
· 1¼ cups confectioners’ sugar
· 1 cup marshmallow fluff
· 1 tablespoon juice from frozen wild blueberries that have been thawed and mashed
Special equipment:
· medium-sized ice cream scoop
· large piping bag and extra-large round piping tip
Directions:
1) Arrange two racks in the oven with one rack a third of the way down from the top and the second rack a third of the way up from the bottom. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper. Set aside.
2) In a small bowl, stir together the whole milk and lemon juice. Set aside. Note that the acid in the lemon juice will curdle the milk. Don’t worry about the reaction between the lemon juice and milk. The addition of the lemon juice mixed with milk will help yield fluffy cakes.
3) In a medium bowl, combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
4) In a large bowl, cream together the butter and dark brown sugar until combined. Add in the egg and vanilla extract. Mix until combined. Add half of the flour mixture from the medium bowl and half of the milk mixed with lemon juice from the small bowl. Stir to combine all the ingredients. Add the remaining flour mixture and milk mixture. Combine until the batter is fluffy and smooth. Gently fold in the mashed wild blueberries.
5) Use the medium-sized ice cream scoop to scoop up the cake batter. Release the batter onto the large sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Continue scooping up the batter and releasing onto the sheet pan until each of the large sheet pans are filled with six scoops of batter each and are at least one-inch apart from one another. Transfer the two sheet pans into the oven with one sheet pan positioned at the top rack and one sheet pan positioned at the bottom rack. Bake the cakes at 350°F for 9 minutes. Rotate the sheet pans and swap position of the sheet pans in the oven. Bake for another 9 minutes. The total baking time for the cakes will be 18 minutes. Gently remove the sheet pans from the oven and allow the cakes to cool completely before filling, about an hour.
6) To make the filling, thoroughly combine the butter, confectioners’ sugar, marshmallow fluff, and juice from the wild blueberries together in a large bowl. Scoop the filling into a large piping bag fitted with an extra-large piping tip. Flip over one cake and with the flat side up, start filling the cake by drawing swirls in a circular motion starting from the outside edges and ending in the inside. Continue this process until the flat sides of six of the cakes are topped with filling. Gently top with the remaining six cakes to form whoopie pies. Enjoy!
Takeaways: I found that working in a cool kitchen works best when making these whoopie pies as the filling is easier to work with. The whoopie pies also maintain their shape better in a cooler kitchen. I sometimes even chill the chocolate cakes in the refrigerator to speed up the cooling time and to prevent the warm cakes from melting and/or deflating the filling in the whoopie pies. To store leftover whoopie pies, I wrap them up with plastic wrap and keep them in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.