I’ve never eaten a whoopie pie, so I’m not sure how they’re supposed to turn out. I love bananas and these look good, so I decided to try them.

It was a fun, but somewhat frustrating experience. I had some issues with the pastry bag! Check it out. 

The recipe has a lot of ingredients! And only 1 stick of butter? Don’t worry, there’s 1/2 cup sour cream and 16 oz (2 packages) cream cheese to make up for it!

Step 1: Gather ingredients for cookies: flour, butter, mashed banana, vanilla, egg, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, sour cream.

See? I told you that was a lot.

Step 2: Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. 

Step 3: Combine banana and sour cream.

This does not look appetizing. It reminded me of rotten cottage cheese. Except it smelled good.

Step 4: Beat butter and both sugars until fluffy. 

I packed that brown sugar so firmly that it held its shape!

I used the timer this time (for 3 minutes) because I think the dough from a past recipe was too dense from undermixing at this step.

Step 5: Add egg and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. 

I’m getting a little better at not spilling the ingredients when I pour them into the mixer. Not perfect yet.

Step 6: Add banana mixture in 2 additions, alternating with flour mixture. 

This photo doesn’t show much, but that’s because this step required both my hands. A photo assistant would have been helpful here. Not that you really wanted to see that banana mixture again.

Step 7: Transfer batter to a pastry bag. 

This was my first experience with a pastry bag. This one is from IKEA and it’s cloth. I learned a trick online to make this easy, but I thought I needed to get the real experience. I’ll show you that trick another time.

Step 8: Pipe batter into 1 1/4-inch rounds on parchment-lined baking sheets. 

SHIT. I overfilled the bag. As I squeezed, it came out both ends.

This was not easy to work with, either, because the dough was very tacky and clung onto anything it touched.

Not pretty. Is that what you mean when you say ‘pipe into rounds,’ Martha? You confuse me sometimes. They’ll melt and lose the spiral pattern, right? Hello?

Hi, pretty! BANANA SLUDGE SEEPED THROUGH THE SEAM. It was all over my hands. I started to lose my appetite for this cookie.

The second batch looked better. Still weird, but better.

Step 9: Bake for 12 10 minutes. Transfer cookies, still on parchment, to wire racks. 

So, uh, I forgot to take a picture of the cookies before I filled them. You’ll see them later.

Step 10: Gather ingredients for filling: an artery-clogging amount of cream cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla. 

Don’t think of the fat, don’t think of the fat…

Step 11: Beat until smooth. 

Step 12: Pipe (yeah right!) or spoon cream cheese mixture onto flat sides of the cookies, sandwich. 

I used an icing spatula to put it on. I wasn’t about to wrangle that bag again.

Oh, there, you can kind of see the cookies on the right.

They don’t look a lot like whoopie pies and I’m not sure if they taste like them, but they look pretty good and taste awesome!

Step 13: EAT ‘EM!

I was only scared because that was my 4th one and I remembered how much cream cheese and sugar I’d eaten. I ate it anyway. I don’t regret it.

Link to original recipe

Yields: 36
I got: 48

Start time: 7:15
End time: 8:40 (1 hour, 25 minutes)
Martha’s estimated time: 1 hour

What did I learn?

• Pastry bags suck! They are so hard to use.
• Cutting parchment before you begin cuts time and stress.

What do I need to learn?

• How do you clean a pastry bag? There is still dough stuck inside the seams.
• How do you load a pastry bag? That process sucked.
• How should I have piped the dough to get more consistent cookies that actually looked like whoopie pie pieces?

I know I’ve been making a lot of sandwich cookies, but there are a lot in this app. I’ll take a break for the next recipe.

Kristina hates bananas. I’m putting some under her pillow.