I mentioned before Thanksgiving that I was in the process of making these pumpkin whoopie pies to take for the festivities. Overall they were fairly successful, but I might change a few things next time.
First up was the pumpkin bread itself. It was easy and very tasty with lots of yummy fall spices as you can see above.
The cookies had to be baked first. I called them cookies, but they were really more the consistency of cake once baked. On the left is a “before” photo and on the right is an “after” photo, so you can see that they really don’t change much from the shape you plop the dough down in. Knowing this now, I would have been more careful forming little mounds on the cookie sheet. Oh! I also would have made them smaller, since these resulted in some seriously large whoopie pies.
I finished the cookies on Tuesday night, since we would be driving down to Corpus Christi on Wednesday night. This wasn’t a bad plan, but I forgot about that thing that always seems to happen to pumpkin bread or pumpkin muffins — they get sticky. Like, REALLY sticky. I put them in the refrigerator all day Wednesday before assembling the pies just before we left, and that helped a little, but a lot the stickiness remained.
I made the cream cheese icing on Tuesday night too and left it in the fridge. Did you know cream cheese icing is just butter, powdered sugar, and cream cheese? No wonder it’s so tasty.
I assembled the pies and they looked really good. I put them all in a pan and then stored them in the fridge once we got to Jose’s mom’s house because the fridge helped them stay firm. I thought these would be a good thing to make because I thought they’d be easy to transport. In retrospect, I wasn’t really thinking straight, because these are not really the best “make ahead and take with you” desserts. Plain ol’ cookies would have been easier. But oh well.
The final product was a hit in general and they all got eaten at Thanksgiving. My own verdict? I give them a B-. The pumpkin cake-cookies were very yummy, but sticky. I don’t know what I can do to cut the stickiness factor, but there must be something. Still, the stickiness was just an annoyance and didn’t affect the taste, which was excellent. The cream cheese icing, on the other hand, was yummy but SOOOOOO sweet. The combination of pumpkin bread plus the icing was too much sugar for my tastes, and I think I would have personally preferred them with whipped cream in the middle instead of icing. If I make them again, I plan to give that a try.
