Banana Whoopie Pies with Maple Almond Butter Filling

Today’s recipe started out with the best of intentions. Remember how the road to hell is paved? Yeah.

A friend and I recently had the opportunity to make maple almond butter from scratch (we used this recipe, and the finished product was very similar to Justin’s, the real deal). The result was so pleasant that I was beyond eager to highlight this ingredient in a pastry of some kind. After combing the interwebs for inspiration, I decided the nut butter would be perfect in a filling for banana whoopie pies. In my imagination, the finished product would taste like a tricked out version of banana bread and be much cuter. I was correct in one of these projections.

To achieve my banana nut butter whoopie dreams, I cherry-picked elements from two of Martha Stewart’s recipes, adapting the second one to accommodate the almond butter. The first four steps of this recipe provided the perfect banana cakes to be the top and bottom of the whoopie pies. And here I took Martha’s recipe for whoopie pie filling and tweaked it a bit. Perhaps that’s the lesson to take away from today’s failure: Don’t. Tweak. Martha. 

Things started off normally enough. Bananas were mashed and dry ingredients were combined. Today my friend Lindsey agreed to be guest sous chef. Here she gracefully combines and sifts flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.

And this is what happens when you assist a tyrannical baker in her 4oz kitchen. Lindsey was about to cream the sugars and butter when I challenged her about the adequacy of her butter’s softness. I felt like it wasn’t soft enough, but she persuaded me otherwise by putting two sizeable finger holes into the stick. Point taken, Lindsey, point taken. (Game of Thrones watchers, does this picture remind anybody else of the tragic fate of one Oberyn Martell?)

Butter-based conflicts aside, everything was going smoothly at this point. The batter turned out great, and after about 15 minutes in the oven, we had enough cakelets for 15 whoopie pies.

The next step is decidedly where things took a turn, and messing with Martha came back to bite me. Starting with her whoopie pie filling recipe, I substituted my home-made nut butter instead of regular butter (the internet said this would be okay; News Bulletin: the internet lies). I also added about 3oz of cream cheese to temper the sweetness of the confectioner's sugar and marshmallow fluff. In retrospect, this was probably a poor choice. When everything was combined, the filling looked pretty normal, and I was extremely satisfied with the flavor resulting from all of my variations. Lindsey and I visited a special little corner of heaven when we taste tested the finished product and put a dollop of it onto one of the reject banana cakes.

Sadly, the consistency of this filling left lots and lots to be desired. It was much too heavy and runny, so the cake tops and bottoms slid all over each other instead of sticking together neatly. Eventually, the notion came to us to use toothpicks to secure the cake pieces together, and we let the finished sandwich cakes set up in the freezer just to make sure. Finally, the whole situation surpassed the point of salvaging and instead became laughable. Very Laughable. These are definitely the most pitiful looking desserts this kitchen has produced in a long time – maybe even worse looking than the results of The Great Cake-Pop Debacle of ’09. But if you don’t mind getting your fingers a little sticky, and if you close your eyes while you’re eating them, these really do taste pretty stellar, so I’m going to stop apologizing now. And maybe respect Martha's instructions a little more reverently in the future.

Also, to redeem ourselves, Lindsey and I broke out some impossible-to-screw-up puff pastry I had in the fridge and tried our hand at pastry origami. Those turned out quite pretty, so we ended on a high note after all.

Before:

And After: 

Harvey Wallbanger Cake

I'm visiting Nashville again. Surprise surprise. My good friends Emily and Aaron agreed to let me set up camp in the living room of their new apartment for the week, and one goal Emily and I set for my visit on top of catching up, enjoying the city, and getting her new kitchen organized, was to return to the good ol' Booze Cakes cookbook (Aaron was part of all of these goals too, of course, but  he may have been less aware that Booze Cakes were always part of the plan. Nevertheless, he was a good sport since eating baked goods was his primary role in this particular project). So on Friday, after perusing many tempting options, Emily and I settled on a cake meant to capture the flavors of the  Harvey Wallbanger cocktail, named after the popular Manhattan Beach surfer who was a regular patron of Duke's Blackwatch Bar on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. What better inspiration for a summery cake than a drink that would fit right into Beach Blanket Bingo? 

Basically, the Harvey Wallbanger is a screwdriver with Galliano, an anise-flavored liqueur, floated over the top. Of course we decided that it was only appropriate to make actual Harvey Wallbangers to sustain us while we labored through the arduous six-ingredient, two-step project, and at this point I would like to officially register a request for someone to please remind me how much I dislike anise-flavored things if I ever, EVER get the idea to make this drink (or cake) in the future.

So to start, here are the components. See the boxed cake mix and the packet of instant pudding? That's called cheating at life. But the cookbook told us these were all the things we needed, aside from eggs, oil and liquor, so we drank our drinks and followed instructions.

Our cake's inspiration: the Harvey Wallbanger was allegedly invented in 1952, the same year that Queen Elizabeth took the throne and the TV show Dragnet premiered. My grandma surprised me last Christmas when we were chatting and she off-handedly mentioned how she used to drink these on New Year's Eve when she was younger. So Emily and I toasted to cool grandmothers everywhere as we sampled our drinks and started baking.

Dump all of the ingredients into a bowl at once and mix? Check.

Pour into a well-buttered-and-floured bundt pan and make another cocktail because maybe you'll miraculously start liking the flavor of Galliano this second time around? Check.

After 45 minutes, our cake was ready to cool and come out of the pan. It smelled as good as this picture looks. No joke.

Someone may have been a little over zealous with the flouring of the pan, but that cake sure didn't stick when we flipped it over. We'd also used Emily's non-stick cake pan from William Sonoma which was pretty boss, so that probably didn't hurt either. The cake cooled for half an hour or so before we were ready to move onto the last step: prepare and apply an orange glaze lightly infused with vodka and Galliano...

The trouble began when Emily slipped off to the kitchen without telling anyone. She was trying to make glaze in stealth mode so I wouldn't notice her using her own recipe instead of following the Booze Cakes instructions. Aaron and I caught her just as she was adding a few glugs of OJ to a bowlful of confectioner's sugar. Now, any of you who read this blog regularly know how I was recently burned when I tried to use the "I'll Just Eyeball It" technique to measure small amounts of concentrated liquids (if you have no idea what I'm talking about but you care to find out, refer to the Blueberry Sour Cream Tartlets post from last month), so you can imagine my dismay when I caught Emily in the middle of just such a transgression. At that point, we had no choice but to hold a a glaze-off, in which I followed the cookbook instructions to make the cake glaze and Emily tossed ingredients into a bowl in what appeared to be a helter skelter fashion. Aaron agreed to be our objective judge. Guess who won. (Also guess which one of us neglected to mention that she'd been making glazes for large batches of holiday cookies for decades, a fact which, had I been cognizant of, would have saved me much consternation and general freaking out). Emily's was better. Way better.

After the superior glaze has been adequately drizzled onto our cake, we'd reached the end of the recipe, but we felt like some elements of visual appeal were missing. After all, we eat with all of our senses, right?

So Emily got out her mandolin and sliced us up some paper thin orange garnishes. Much better.

And while we're covering things with things, why not add a little dusting of confectioner's sugar?

Witness this open toolbox, mail pile, and fancy dessert: If I were feeling poetic, I'd suggest that kitchen tables were a nice symbol of complexity because they're the point of intersection where so many diverse elements of life come to rest and temporarily juxtapose one another, inviting us to consider how the different aspects of our existence are similarly bound together yet always in tension.  Life influencing dessert, or dessert influencing life?  

so much depends
upon

a liquor soaked
cake

glazed with powdered
sugar

beside the red
toolbox.