It’s Sunday afternoon in New Jersey. We’re in the path of Hurricane Sandy so we’ve been spending the weekend securing stuff, gathering supplies, and generally battening down every hatch. We’ve even found out that both my and my husband’s places of employment are closed Monday. To an extent, there’s a lot of waiting going on—waiting for the weather to change; waiting for the winds to whip up; and hoping against hope that the winds and water are merciful. As the mother of a four-year-old, I’m also hoping that Halloween—just three days away—isn’t ruined. I know, it’s much more important that we all get through this safely; but Halloween is such a big deal for kids this age. Part of me just wants to laugh in the face of fear. So I reached into my cupboard and took down the Pillsbury Halloween Funfetti Whoopie Pie Kit that has been taunting me for weeks.
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| Cookie halves cooling |
A small confession: I’m not the greatest cook in the world and even a virtually fool-proof mix like this has me a bit intimidated. But we need some good cheer. And I have no intention of letting this box mock me after the holiday. The instructions call for well-greased cookie sheets so I decided to go one better and use baking parchment. Basically, you mix up the batter, drop it by teaspoonfuls onto your cookie sheet, and spread it into a circle with the back of the spoon. All this went amazingly well. And I was surprised when I was able to easily get twenty-four cookies out of the batter. Granted, they were smallish, but I wasn’t about to mess with the official measure.
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| Everybody's favorite Doughboy |
I baked them for exactly the seven minutes on the box and I was very pleased when they came out of the oven—basically perfect. Without meaning to, I had fulfilled my greatest childhood wish: I had created my own Drake’s Cakes. That was the texture and look of the finished “cookies.” And the parchment paper worked great. The cookies peeled right off. Now, they were hardly perfect circles, but they looked absolutely delicious. The kit came with two squeeze bags of vanilla icing/filling, with enough to create the sandwiches, though if you tried to imitate the thick filling on the box, the icing pretty much squeezed out the sides.
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The finished product: maybe not
beautiful but delicious |
My daughter helped put the sandwiches together and she rolled the pies in the sprinkles. They don’t look as perfect as the Whoopie Pies on the box, but I stopped trying for that years ago. The taste? Yummy. The cake was delicate and moist, that perfect snack-cake consistency. The icing was very sweet, but I’d have been surprised if it wasn’t. The sprinkles helped to hold the icing in place and do add a bit of Halloween cheer. All told, I’d buy this again in a heartbeat. So take that, Hurricane Sandy! You’ll have your way tomorrow. But today, life is sweet.
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