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: