Traditional Amish Whoopie Pies: The Secret Is Revealed.....

Today's offering is these deliciously soft and squishy chocolate whoopie pies with their traditional whipped buttercream filling! And these cakes really taught me a huge lesson.

Now, I now I've made whoopie pies before, but this time it's different. Sometimes an old dog can learn new tricks, and sometimes a metric person can be surprised by American cups. For my entire cooking career, I have measured baking ingredients in mass (weight) measurements: pounds, ounces, kilos and grammes have been part of my everyday kitchen practise. In my opinion, the accuracy of measuring things in weight makes the recipes easily repeatable with the same results every time.... in theory.

I've always been put off cups because the idea of having to dirty a cup when one could just measure all the ingredients in the same bowl on a scale makes no sense to me. Also, every cup of flour -- no matter how carefully you try to measure the cup exactly the same way every time -- weighs differently. An Australian cup is different to an American cup, and what do you do if you don't have a set of cups?

For all of these reasons, I have spent my entire baking career avoiding them. However, from personal experience, translating or converting cup measurements to weight measurements can fail absolutely miserably.

When I decided to make these whoopie pies, I found a traditional Amish recipe and, of course, it was measured in cups. I made the recipe using cups, and it worked perfectly! As I was scooping the cups of ingredients I was weighing them exactly. Having noted how much each cup of each ingredient weighed, I noted it for perfectly replicable results! Or, so I thought.

When I made them again using my painstakingly measured weights, they were an absolute failure. I was so confused: surely, it should have worked perfectly? I did it again with the cups, again measuring the weights of the cups, and even though this times most of the weights were completely different it still turned out perfectly like the first time.

So my main take away is: if the recipe is designed for cups, use cups. And if the recipe is designed for grammes, use grammes.

I believe now, after this wonderfully humbling experiment, that weights are not the be all and end all, and that recipes should be made using the measurements they were designed with. I'm just glad I had a set of measuring cups!

For those who are interested in making these beauties, I used Family Favourite's recipe Traditional Amish Chocolate Whoopie Pies to make these. They are moist, soft, sweet, and deeply chocolatey. The addition of egg white in the icing makes it super light and fluffy. I heartily recommend this recipe! If you want plain vanilla cakes, I have discovered that simply replacing the cocoa powder cup for cup with flour works a charm.