Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

For the record, I don't think I had ever eaten a whoopie pie (the dessert du jour, cupcakes are out!) let alone made one. But, 'tis the season for pumpkin things, and I wanted to make a Halloween treat for our Halloween-themed monthly pub trivia night at the Magpie. I had this recipe from Food Network magazine picked out, which involved a chocolate cookie and pumpkin icing, but the online reviews turned me off - good thing I checked! A quick Google search found a multitude of recipes, and I picked Rachael Ray's Pumpkin Whoopie Pies because they seemed to be what I wanted - a pumpkin-flavoured cookie with cream cheese icing.

I don't make cookies too often (they're hard to make healthy since the best ones are full of butter) but I figured since a large group would be eating these, I could go crazy. The batter was different from the choco-chip cookies I normally make - it's made with melted butter and brown sugar, which gave the cookies more of a cake texture.

Despite (or because of?) my use of a cookie scoop (a Xmas present from last year) the thick batter didn't really smooth out very easily, so the cookies were a little bumpy and not all were particularly round, but mostly the same size. Clearly this is a skill I need to work on. But they were a lovely dark orange colour.

Next up was making the cream cheese icing - seemed a pretty standard icing. Which means it was delicious, of course. Hmm.. think I still have some in the fridge... the recipe made twice as much icing as I used, and I thought I had used a generous amount in each 'pie'. Clearly I should have used more! Just didn't want them getting too messy in their Tupperware in the fridge.

Sandwiching them together was pretty fun, mostly because of the large amount of icing I ate in the process. The cookies were so thick that the pies were quite tall - lots of cookie goodness in each bite. My friends seemed to enjoy them - and we ended up in a solid 3rd place at trivia.