Baked Sunday Mornings: Brown Sugar Whoopie Pies with Maple Marshmallow Filling

This week's Baked Sunday Mornings recipe is presented in honor of National Maple Syrup Day: Brown Sugar Whoopie Pies with Maple Marshmallow Filling. We don't eat pancakes or waffles at home, but we always have a bottle maple syrup in the fridge; I use it for baking and my husband Tom uses it in brining liquids for meats. Unfortunately, this recipe calls not only for maple syrup but also for maple extract -- something I've never used before. I couldn't find natural maple extract anywhere and wasn't all that interested in ordering a bottle online just to use it in this one recipe, so I resigned myself to making a less maple-y version of these whoopie pies without it.

The first step in making the whoopie pies is to put rolled oats in the food processor and pulse until you get a mixture of oat powder and broken oat pieces. I applied a tip I picked up from Mindy Segal's Oatmeal Scotchies recipe and toasted the oats in the oven first to help bring out their flavor. The rest of the recipe is easy. You combine all of the wet ingredients (brown sugar, canola oil, eggs, plain yogurt, sour cream, and maple syrup) and fold in the dry ingredients (the processed oats, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon).

After a quick chill, the batter was still quite thin. I used a #50 scoop to portion the batter and got a lot of cakes -- 64 total, so a yield of 32 assembled whoopie pies. This was quite a surprise because the recipe says it yields 15-17 small whoopie pies or 8-10 larger ones. The cakes baked up relatively flat and looked a lot like oatmeal cookies.
To make the marshmallow filling, you beat egg whites to soft peaks; beat in a hot syrup of water, sugar, and gelatin; and whip until firm peaks form. You're supposed to add two to three teaspoons of maple extract to taste and I incorporated a tablespoon of maple syrup instead -- you couldn't really taste it in the finished product and I didn't want to take a chance on ruining the texture by adding too much syrup so I left it alone.

The marshmallow had a nice texture and kept its shape without seeping out of the assembled whoopie pies. I thought these tasted great. The oatmeal cake -- while closer to a soft oatmeal cookie than a cake -- is so good. It has a hearty and rich caramel-y flavor from the brown sugar and oats, and just a light touch of warm cinnamon. The cake is delicious all on its own. I couldn't detect any maple flavor in either the cake or filling, but honestly, I didn't miss it at all.

There was something very comforting about these whoopie pies. Even without the maple extract, they were a homey and satisfying treat.

Recipe: "Brown Sugar Oatmeal Whoopie Pies with Maple Marshmallow Filling" from Baked Occasions by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

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Comments

Pinar said…
your whoopie pies look gorgeous! Perfectly symmetrically and not overflowing with filling like mine were!
Louise said…
I actually have a bottle of natural maple extract that I bought recently at the local Mennonite bulk store. I'm not sure what I intended to use it for, but I may have to try these, and also go through my "to bake" list. I live in whoopie pie country, but I'm not a whoopie pie fan, so I'll have to make them when I can take the whoopie pies somewhere.