Chocolate Whoopie Pie with Strawberry Cream

Baking – exactly what rainy days were invented for.

You can’t have missed the explosion of whoopie pies in the past few months. I first had a whoopie pie about 7 years ago at a local pub quiz of all places and I remember it was flavoured with Jack Daniels, but I had not got around to trying to bake them myself until now.

My pies are very rich and chocolatey, hence I have used a very English summer light cream filling and not a more traditional American filling which is normally a lot heavier made with butter cream or marshmallow.

Here are some other posts on the subject from: Adventures of a foodie , The Foodie List, From the sweet kitchen, The English Kitchen, and of course the best looking whoopie award goes to the very talented Mowielicious.

Chocolate Whoopie Pie

Ingredients

250g plain flour

75g coco powder

100g margarine

100g caster sugar

1 egg, separated

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp baking powder

150ml milk

pinch of salt

Method

Preheat the oven to gas mark 6 (200c).

Whisk the egg white into soft peaks and set aside.

Beat the the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, add the egg yolk, vanilla essence, baking powder and a pinch of salt. Using a mixer sift in the flour and coco powder and salt mixing all the time to fully incorporate, this should produce a fine coco crumb.

Slowly pour in the milk while still mixing, and then the egg whites, this will produce a sticky clay like mixture.

Using a tablespoon scoop out the mixture and roll into approximately 1 inch balls. You should get about 16 balls from the mixture.

Place on a greased baking tray and flatten slightly. (As you can see from the photo, I omitted the flattening!)

Bake for 10 minutes, then remove from oven and place on a wire rack to cool down before filling.

Strawberry cream filling

Ingredients

15 Strawberries

2 tsp caster sugar, preferably with a hint of vanilla

250ml double cream

Method

Finely slice 5 strawberry’s and set aside with a little sugar sprinkled on top. Squash the remaining strawberry’s into a pulp with the rest of the sugar. Beat the cream into soft peaks and stir in both the strawberries.

Use the strawberry cream to sandwich the whoopie pies together.