Carrot Cake Whoopie Pies

Back in May I donated "one baked good once a month for a year" to an auction held at our church with proceeds going to my daughter's youth group mission trip. I was excited right away about the all of the different options I had to chose from. I went Pinterest shopping, but up until now I hadn't ventured too much out of my past experiments.

Some of the recipes I've made are:

Pumpkin Bread with a cinnamon glaze (missed an opportunity to blog this one)
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Muffins
Better Than Sex Cake with caramel and Rolos
Scones


This month I made Carrot Cake Whoopie Pies. My original plan was to make everything homemade but in the end I realized time wise that wasn't going to work. I then decided to use a cake mix in place of a from-scratch dough. It made the process very painless and quick.

What you'll need:
copycat from What's Baking in the Barbershop?

Carrot Cake Cookies
One box of carrot cake cake mix
2 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil

Cream Cheese Frosting
8oz cream cheese, softened
5 Tbsp butter, softened
2 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups powered sugar
1 tsp fresh lemon juice

For the cookies:

Mix together cake mix, eggs and oil. It seems a little sticky in the beginning but just keep whisking or stirring and it will come together nicely.

Preheat oven to 375. Prepare a cookie sheet with spray, parchment paper or a baking mat. Spoon dough onto the pan. I used two spoons. One to spoon it out of the bowl and the other to guide it off the spoon and onto the pan. Bake for about 9-10 minutes. Remove from oven and let rest for 2-3 minutes. Place on baking rack to cool.

For the frosting:


In a stand mixer, combine cream cheese and butter. Cream together. Mix in vanilla. Slowly add the powdered sugar. Finally mix in lemon juice. Place in  refrigerator 25-30 minutes.

Put them together:

Once cookies are completely cool and frosting has set, it's time to make the whoopie pie. Find cookies that are roughly the same size. Spread a generous amount of frosting on the bottom of one cookie. Gently press the other cookie on top of the frosting. There you go! You are done and your tummy will be pleased. Pleased indeed!

Got rotten bananas?

So you got yourself a few rotten nanners? For the love of Betty Crocker, please don’t throw them. If you don’t have time to whip up a baked good with the overly ripened boomerangs, peel and freeze them for the time being.

Bananas rarely stand a chance of getting brown and mushy in our house. We have 6 common day apes living here. Well, with the exception of me. I am not a huge fan of plain bananas. Toss them in a bakery type item and add 900 calories, you can count on me to eat it. A few of my small men think they need a banana with every meal. You won’t find me complaining about that.

There are many options for the bananas once they have become fully matured. The obvious being banana bread. You could also do (WARNING: prepare yourself for this one... total yumness) pancakes, muffins, waffles (click on the item to be linked to a recipe). 

I choose to make banana bars. Main reason… cream cheese frosting. 

Here we go...

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 (give or take) cup mashed ripe bananas
• 1 (16 ounce) container cream cheese frosting

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease a 10x15 inch jellyroll pan. 
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then stir in the sour cream and vanilla. Combine the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt; stir into the batter. Finally, mix in the mashed banana. Spread evenly into the prepared pan.
3. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes in the preheated oven, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Allow bars to cool completely before frosting with the cream cheese frosting. 

A frosting tip: freeze the bars then frost. This helps to not smear the bars all over. 

One thing you should know about me, I find rebellion in just about everything I do. I like to add my own flare to things. In recipes and my life in general, this is true for me. So... I added cinnamon to the original recipe. Yes, I am that wild and crazy. Find the original recipe HERE.