Tasty Tuesday

While Valentines day has come and gone, I had one more special dessert that I wanted to make using a cute heart-shaped whoopie pie pan that a friend gave me for Christmas. Since whoopie pies are good any time of the year, I figure this would be a fun recipe to try out.

These are the ingredients needed for the pies themselves. Butter, flour, brown sugar, buttermilk, salt, vanilla, baking powder, baking soda, an egg, and dutch cocoa powder.

You'll want to preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Spray your whoppie pan with non-stick cooking spray.

In a large mixing bowl, you will want to beat 1/2 cup of butter and 1 cup brown sugar until it is light and fluffy. Roughly, about 3 minutes. 

You will then want to add in 1 egg and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. Mix them in until they are well combined. 

In a separate mixing bowl, you will want to mix together 2 cups of flour, 1/3 cup of cocoa powder, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. The original directions say to sift these items together. Since I don't have a sifter, I mix them together with a whisk, and that seems to work pretty well.

You will want to gradually mix in the dry ingredients in with the butter mixture and mix on a low speed. 

When all the dry ingredients have been added in, you will want to add in 1 cup of buttermilk and mix on low until combined. 

Once it has all been mixed together, it will look like this. Mmmm....it looks good just like that, but, we're not done. If you want to stop here and just enjoy the batter, feel free, I'm going to continue. 

You will want to then fill each heart with 2 tablespoons of batter, they should be about 2/3 the way full. I overfilled mine a bit, but that is okay. 

You will want them to bake for 8-10 minutes, or until the cake springs back when touched. While those are baking, we can start on the filling. 

We just need a few ingredients for the filling. Butter, powdered sugar, salt, vanilla, and marshmallow creme.

In a large mixing bowl, you will want to beat 6 tablespoons of butter with an electric mixer until creamy. 

Once the butter is creamy, you will want to add in 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar and 1/8 teaspoon of salt; mix well. Then, add in one jar of marshmallow creme and 1 teaspoon of vanilla and blend well. 

By now, your whoopie pies should be ready to come out of the oven.

You will want to let them cool for about 8 minutes in the pan, and then move them to a rack to let them finish cooling completely. While I waited for this to be done, I just put the filling in the refrigerator. 

By the time my pies were done cooling, I was so excited to get them filled, I neglected to take a photo of the finished filling before I started filling the whoopie pies, but you can get a pretty good idea of what it should look like. 

See? It should be slightly shiny and pretty thick. It is wonderful, I know that for sure. To fill them, I just used a decorating bag and cut off the end. I didn't even bother with any type of decoration tip.

Here they are all finished. Since I filled my whoopie pie pans with a little too much batter, my pies are a little thicker than they probably should have been. It doesn't matter though, they are delicious. 

Hope everyone had a happy Valentines day!

Peace out *g*