Two Fat Cats Whoopie Pie

Could there possibly be a better name for a dessert?  Just calling it Whoopie Pie is a stunner, but adding Two Fat Cats?  It's wonderful.  Rose says that whoopie pie is a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition.  The staid Amish women would put it in their husbands' lunch boxes, or so the story goes, and when their husbands opened the lunch box, they would shout "Whoopie!"   Well, maybe.  I come from Pennsylvania Dutch stock myself.  As the Wikipedia article on "Pennsylvania Dutch" will tell you, you don't have to be from Pennsylvania to be Pennsylvania Dutch--you can be from northern Indiana, too, as I am.  (You're not Dutch either; "Dutch" is a corruption of "Deutsch.")  We did not have whoopie pies, although we did have Shoo Fly pies, as well as Old-Fashioned Cream pies (not a cream pie at all--more like a heavy, very sweet custard).  Also, I never heard my grandfather say "Whoopie!"  I might have said "whoopie" when I ate this "pie," which is also known as a "gob."  I don't like to call it a gob.  Amish women used to call it a hucklebuck, which sounds more like something my grandpa would have said, but I never heard of that either.
I don't know what took me so long to get around to making this. I think I was put off by the fake marshallow cream because I really don't like marshmallow and figured I wouldn't want to make something that resembled it. I was wrong on that count, although my "marshmallow" didn't fluff up the way it's supposed to. But more about that later.
The cake was simplicity itself. But here's a sad picture.

I got out my package of dark brown Muscovado sugar, and it was hard as a Muscovado rock. I tried the wrap-the-sugar-in-a-damp-towel trick and the microwave-with-bowl-of-water trick, but the rock remained stubborning rockish. So I got out some boring but soft light brown sugar.

The sugar, egg, butter, and oil mix up to be a tawny brown. If you used Muscovado sugar, it would be darker. And probably better, too, but you don't have to rub it in.

Then the flour and cocoa mixture is added alternately with the buttermilk. Jim told me to include a picture of the buttermilk so you could see that I don't have that much left to use up.

I used a two-tablespoon measure to put the batter on the baking sheet. As I was doing this, I kept making them bigger and bigger because it looked like I had way too much batter for six blobs of batter. After I did about three, Jim said, "So do you put the other six on the other baking sheet?" "Huh?" I said. "Well, aren't these just halves?" he asked. I said a few words that would have shocked my Pennsylvania Dutch forebears, and started mentally dividing the batter into twelve blobs instead of six.

I smoothed the batter a little, but the mounds of chocolate batter went into the oven looking pretty rough.

But they came out of the oven looking good, making me glad I hadn't bothered with more smoothing.
Then the frosting. I swear I'm getting worse at making buttercream since I found out it was hard. Before I knew how tricky and unpredictable it was considered to be, my buttercreams turned out fine. A friend of mine really jinxed me when she asked me if I'd give her a little tutorial on buttercreams. I haven't made a decent one since. The idea with this "marshmallow" is to make a meringue, then a "finishing cream," and then mix then together.

Bubbling sugar syrup.....

Mixed with a beaten egg white. I may not have beaten the egg white enough, because it didn't maintain its texture after I added the syrup. Last time I made a meringue, I said I thought it was better to overbeat than underbeat, and I should have paid attention to myself. I have it on good authority (Rose) that adding a bit of cream of tartar makes it difficult to do damage to the egg whites by overbeating. Now we all know.
Suffice it to say that the buttercream did not look like marshmallow cream, and I did not get to "step back on my heels and congratulate myself on making a perfect buttercream," which I'd been looking forward to. I was even thinking of clicking my heels together as I congratulated myself.

It still tasted delicious, and Sarah, for whom it served as a birthday cake, was completely in love with the whole idea of whoopie pies in general, and her particular Whoopie Pie with a candle on it in particular.
Oh, by the way, I do remember somewhat snobbily declaring that Fudgy Pudgy brownies did not pass my Presidential dessert name test. And yet here I am, crazy about the name Whoopie Pie. Maybe it's just in my genes. Assuming that I ever figure out how to make buttercream again, I'd happily serve it to the President. And, who knows, he might just take one look at it, smile, and say, "Whoopie"!

TASTING PANEL:
Sarah: "Wonderful! The creamy center is amazing--this is what marshmallows should taste like."
James: "Tasty. Light and fluffy." [When I offered Sarah the last two pies to take home, James enthusiastically accepted].
Jim: "The crust has a kind of chewiness that I like, and the cookie thing has a nice chocolate flavor. The cream is not overwhelming, but it's really very good."