I was tooling around the McCormick web site the other day looking for recipes (Tom and I are pretty loyal Penzey's customers when it comes to spices, but I do buy lots and lots and lots of McCormick red food coloring to use for making red velvet cake), and I came across a recipe for gingerbread whoopie pies with lemon creme. I am a big fan of whoopie pies and have made them in the traditional chocolate flavor, as well as pumpkin and carrot varieties. But I had never seen a gingerbread whoopie pie before, and it seemed so seasonally appropriate that I decided to give the recipe a try.
I used a #50 scoop to parcel out my chilled dough, and I rolled each ball of dough in some coarse sugar before baking. The dough puffed up high during baking, but deflated a little upon cooling. The end result was something that looked like a beautiful, sparkly, cracked spice cookie, but in fact had the soft texture of cake. The mix of spices in the cookie was quite nice, and it went well with the light lemon flavoring of the marshmallow-cream cheese filling. Also, the coarse sugar lent the whoopie pies a wonderful crunch. But I wasn't in love with the final product, and I think it was mostly an issue of texture. I'm used to making gingersnaps and spice cookies that are chewy, and I even like my gingerbread to be super chewy. Something just seemed wrong with having the gingerbread component of the whoopie pies be so soft. As pretty and festive as these are, I don't think I will bother making them again.
On a happier note, I tried making cranberry biscotti again, and this time I actually followed the recipe directions and I shaped the dough into two logs, ending up with smaller biscotti. They came out perfectly tender and crunchy this time and I was very pleased with the result.
Recipes:
I used a #50 scoop to parcel out my chilled dough, and I rolled each ball of dough in some coarse sugar before baking. The dough puffed up high during baking, but deflated a little upon cooling. The end result was something that looked like a beautiful, sparkly, cracked spice cookie, but in fact had the soft texture of cake. The mix of spices in the cookie was quite nice, and it went well with the light lemon flavoring of the marshmallow-cream cheese filling. Also, the coarse sugar lent the whoopie pies a wonderful crunch. But I wasn't in love with the final product, and I think it was mostly an issue of texture. I'm used to making gingersnaps and spice cookies that are chewy, and I even like my gingerbread to be super chewy. Something just seemed wrong with having the gingerbread component of the whoopie pies be so soft. As pretty and festive as these are, I don't think I will bother making them again.
On a happier note, I tried making cranberry biscotti again, and this time I actually followed the recipe directions and I shaped the dough into two logs, ending up with smaller biscotti. They came out perfectly tender and crunchy this time and I was very pleased with the result.Recipes:
- Gingerbread Whoopie Pies with Lemon Creme from McCormick.
- Dried Cranberry and White Chocolate Biscotti from epicurious.com.
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