The Quest for the Heavenly Pumpkin Whoopee Pies

After baking for the church sale, I went and bought other people's baked goods, of which there were an impressive variety. (I need to ask Mrs. Miller about the crunchy cookies she makes with potato chips and pretzels, dipped in chocolate. Sounds odd, tastes great; they seem like they have nuts, but they don't.)

Anyhow, I picked up a pair of pumpkin whoopee pies for us to have a for dessert that night. Basically, it's two fluffy pumpkin cake layers with cream cheese frosting in the middle, made with way more sugar than cream cheese. I don't know who made them, but they were awesome. I just had to have the recipe. So I turned to the internet. Here's what I found. (I haven't made any of the following recipes, at least not yet. I don't make any frosting-type substances, because I don't have a hand mixer, though I am putting it on my Christmas list.)

The recipe I found on Martha Stewart's website actually comes from a bakery in Brooklyn called Baked. This is very simple for a Martha Stewart recipe. The filling is definitely more frosting than cream cheese, and has a more than generous amount of sugar in it, so this might be the recipe used for the pies I bought.

A Canadian blog, Culinary Concocotions by Peabody , alters the recipe from Baked by adding maple syrup to the filling. Sounds good, though I would trim the amount of sugar a little, so that the maple syrup replaces some of the sugar instead of piling that on top of the already ample amount.

Of course, Rachel Ray also has her version of the pumpkin whoopee pie.

This recipe makes a smaller batch. Proportionately, the filling uses less sugar, and unlike the others, no butter. It's just cream cheese and sugar. I prefer my cream cheese frosting to be more about the cream cheese, and not overly sweetened, so I think this will be the recipe I make.