Fun with new Christmas presents

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas spent with family, friends, and lots of good food.  "Santa" (aka my dad) was very good to me this year (I must have been a very good girl).  He "brought" some fun "toys" that I was able to put to good use yesterday.  One of the new "toys" was a beautiful, red KitchenAid stand mixer.  He also gave me a fun little cookbook for whoopie pies.  For those of you not familiar with what a whoopie pie is, check out this brief history.  It's sort of like an Oreo, but with a cake like cookie and a plethora of mix and match varieties.  


We had been invited to dinner with some friends and I was tasked with bringing a dessert.  I thought what better opportunity to test out the new mixer and to experiment with some of the recipes from the new cookbook.  After much deliberation, I decided to make a lemon flavored whoopie.  This cookbook suggests that you can make the cake/cookie part of the whoopie pie in various sizes, from 1 inch in diameter to as large as a 9 inch cake, so that's exactly what I decided to do...make a mongo size whoopie pie.  Normally you would drop the batter on a parchment lined baking sheet, but I was afraid they would even enough in size to match up, so I just used a 9" round cake pan and split the batter between two pans.  The problem with using a cake pan is that they do not puff up like they normally would.  They do sell 8-9" whoopie pie pans, but I don't think it's worth the investment unless you're making big whoopie pies on a regular basis.  The lemon flavor of the cake was very subtle, but tasty.

The cookbook shared a whoopie pie suggestion for what they called a Lemon Triple Threat which consisted of the lemon whoopie with a lemon curd filling and a lemon mascarpone cheese filling.  I didn't want to overpower with lemon, so I took the lemon curd and paired it with the traditional marshmallow whoopie pie filling.  In my past attempt to make a lemon curd, I did not have much success.  It never really set up and stayed very runny.  This time I used a different recipe and the result was phenomenal.  Making lemon curd is not very difficult or time consuming, but it is very time and heat sensitive.  Due to the time and heat sensitivity, there were no pictures taken of the process only the end result.

 This has got to be one of the best fillings I have ever had.  The flavor was divine!  It would go great in a cupcake, doughnut, or pie shell.  You could probably even add a little heavy cream to make it more mousse/pudding like.  Excellent!


I put a layer of curd on one of the cakes, topped with a thick layer of the marshmallow filling, topped with another layer of curd and then topped off with the other cake.  The end result was very yummy.  Next time I think I would use less of the marshmallow filling, but there was a lot of filling and I didn't want to waste it, so it ALL ended up in the whoopie pie.  

Stay tuned for more cooking adventures!  Wishing everyone a Happy and Safe New Year and Happy Cooking!