Sunday, November 27, 2011

Thanksgiving Day Baking Challenge!

It's been a REAL long time since I blogged..doesn't mean I haven't been cooking.  Time, life, you name it has gotten the best of me and well not much time to blog.

Anyway..I was on one of my sites and saw a Thanksgiving Day baking challenge and figured I would do it in hopes I would kick start this blog up again.

I submitted a recipe from Ina Garten - Pumpkin Roulade.  It is delicious!! I'm not a fan of anything pumpkin...but this is amazing! I have tweaked it over the years to make it more to my liking. The recipe I got was for a Pumpkin Whoopie Pie from Christine's Kitchen Chronicles!

When I first looked at the recipe I saw two things that raised a red flag 'cloves' and 'maple' - I'm not a fan of either..but again, I'm not a fan of Fall type flavors - pumpkin, cloves, ginger, maple, sweet potato, cranberries, etc... So I immediately thought - do I really need the cloves and what can I use instead of maple? Vanilla..Cinnamon..Brown Sugar???

I decided to follow the recipe as is figuring I'm not the only person who is going to eat them right?  The only difference was that I used a cookie scooper since it was the only thing I had with the quick release mechanism.  So this recipe yielded about 30 'small' whoopie pies and by small I mean a very healthy 'small'.
I thought the clove would be overpowering, but it wasn't.  The combination of the spice from the pumpkin whoopie pie and the sweet maple cinnamon cream was perfect.  The flavors worked very well with each other.  Since I had so many of these little guys I brought some to work and gave some to my neighbors.  They all came back with rave reviews.

They were very easy to make and held up very good.  I made them on Tuesday and put them together on Wednesday. I refrigerated them and they were enjoyed on Thanksgiving Day!!!

Thank you for the recipe..I will be adding it to my Thanksgiving Day recipe files!