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Saturdays at The Prepared Pantry tend to be laid back affairs. It’s a busy day in the store but in the kitchen, we just make stuff…fun stuff, to share with customers. Sometimes our ideas work and sometimes they don’t, but we have lots for folks to try and everyone is happy.
Last Saturday, we started with cupcakes and cookies. Then we made some really good chocolate cheesecake whipped cream for folks to sample.
A good customer put a scoop of chocolate whipped cream between two chocolate cookies to make a sandwich.
“This beats the socks off an Oreo,” he said. He was right.
So, we made more frostings, mostly fluffy whipped cream frostings and more cookies to make more sandwiches. That was a big hit.
Frosted Cookies
The light, airy whipped cream frosting was superb with the cookies. Pretty soon we were just putting big swirls of frosting on top of the cookies. It was a delightful way to try all the frostings and only eat half as many cookies. Besides, with the soft frosting and with two cookies, it tended to squish and squirt out the sides. Piled on top of a single cookie, there was no squishing.
Whoopie Pies
Rachel was working in the kitchen. She started making “cake cookies,” scoops of cream cake batter baked on a cookie sheet. We filled and frosted those also.
They have a name for these, “Whoopie Pies.”
In the past, we’ve made lots of whoopie pies or “cupcake sandwiches.” Cream cake mixes (we have vanilla or fudgy) work better than store mixes for these because they are thicker and denser. But you can make store mixes work by adding a little extra flour.
Sometimes we make them with a cookie scoop as Rachel was doing. You can make round cake cookies with a scoop; the chocolate covered ones here were made with a scoop.
Sometimes we use a muffin top pan to make them. The pans have indentations to hold the batter in place. The indentations are foolproof. You
always have round shapes of an identical size. They do make larger desserts.
The multi-colored sandwiches were made with that pan.
Most of the sandwiches that we made with this pan are filled: we added a pastry filling in the center. We used a pastry bag filled with frosting or whipped cream to make a ring around the perimeter before filling the center with a pastry filling.
The last picture is of a raspberry sandwich. Our raspberry tidbits were added to the batter. That’s a raspberry filling in the center.
Obviously, you can be very creative. Debbie, our daughter, made wormy green apple sandwiches. (Alas, I can’t find the image.) She used green food color for the cakes with gummy worms hanging out of the edges.
About the Author
Dennis Weaver has burned food from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Miami, Florida. He is the founder of The Prepared Pantry in Rigby, Idaho. He loves to help people bake and shares his vast collection of cooking and baking knowledge on his blog as well as in his e-books and magazines. Dennis lives in Rigby, Idaho, with his wife, Merri Ann. They have five wonderful children and six beautiful granddaughters.